HD TRIBUTE TO FREUD WRITING ON THE WALL + ADVENT FOREWORD BY NORMAN HOLMES PEARSON B.D S.U.NA2 Lv, Tra} ‘ova Marina, & NAPOLI Shu u? Sane Hl 20 n0 2009 CARCANETFirst published in Great Britain in 1970 Revise eiton 1985 by. CARCANET PRESS LTD. 208-212 Corn Exchange Building, Manchester MASBQ (Copyright © 1956, 1974 by Norman Holmes Peatson All vights reserved British Library HD. ‘Tribute to Freud.—New ed 1. Psychoanalysis [Title 616.89 17-0924 ISBN 0.85635 loguing in Publi This edition is published by arrange agents forthe Estate of Hilda Doolittle 1 with New Directions Publishing Corp, he publisher acknowledges Financ from the Arts Council of Great Britain, TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD by Norman Holmes Pearson WRITING ON THE WALL ADVENT. APPENDIX: Freud’s Letters to HD. 113 189FOREWORD “Tue past sliterally blasted into consciousness with the Blitz in London,’ H.D. said. Her sessions with Sigmund Freud, when she first wrote about them in 1944, were a part of the past. With him, the desk and walls of his consulting room filled with bibelots which were tokens of history, she had gone back to her childhood, back to the breakup of her marriage and the birth of her child, back to the death of her brother in service in France, and the consequent death, from shock, of her father, and back to the breakup of her literary circle in London - Aldington, Pound, Lawrence, each gone his way. In the Vienna of the early 1930s, with its lengthening shadows, she was putting together the shards of her own history, facing anew war, knowing it would come, fearing it asshe had feared its predecessor. Freud helped her to remember and to understand what she remembered. When she composed ‘Writing on the Wall,’ published in book form as Tribute to Freud, the war had come. Destruction was not a threat but a reality. Experience was a palimpsest. Again she recognized for herself the importance of persistence in remembering. Remembering Freud was sig- nificant, for remembering him was remembering what she had remembered with him. ‘For me, it was soimportant,’ she ‘wrote, repeating, ‘it was so important, my own LEGEND. Yes, my own Lecenp. Then, to get well and re-create it.’ She used ‘legend’ multiply ~ as story, a history, an account, a thing for reading, her own myth. H.D.’s war years brought an astonish- ing revitalization. Silent in a sense for years, suddenly‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD she wrote her war trilogy, several novels and short stories which are still unpublished, the text of By Avon River, drafts of Bid Meto Live, and Tribute to Freud. They were re-creations. All literature is. ‘The earlier version of Tribute to Freudhas been out of printin America, Its reputation and its fascination asan informal por- trait of the great psychoanalyst have persisted. In the past two yearsan English edition hasappeared, as well asa French and an Italian translation. A German translation will appear shortly. Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, reviewed the 1956 publication in The Intemational Journal of Psycho-Analysis. He set a tone. ‘The book, with its appropriate title,’ he sai surely the most delightful and precious appreciation of Freud’s personality that isever likely to be written. Only afine creative artist could have written it. It is like a lovely flower, and the crude pen of a scientist hesitates to profane it by attempting to describe it. I can only say that I envy anyone who has not yet read it, and that it will live as the most enchanting ornament of all the Freudian biographical litera- ture.’ H.D, was pleased. She would have been pleased by its most recent praise; Norman Holland in his Poems in Persons (1973), a psychoanalytic study of the creation and reception of poetry, says, ‘I know of no account by an analysand that tells more about Freud, his techniques, or the analytic experi- cence asit seems from within.’ Thisexpanded version of Tribute to Freud tellsstill more. “Writing on the Wall? was written, as she says in her pre- fatory note, ‘with no reference to the Vienna note-books of spring 1933.’ These had remained in Switzerland. It was when she returned to Lausanne after the war and recovered the notebooks that she wrote‘ “Advent,” the continuation of “Writing on the Wall,” or its prelude.’ The original had been a meditation; ‘Advent’ was its gloss. This more personally FOREWORD detailed section was omitted from the originally published book. Now, however, it is appropriate to include the second part, in which she comments on ‘Writing on the Wall’ as well as expands herself and the significance of self. ‘Advent? is testimony. “Lam on the fringes or in the penumbra of the light of my father’s science and my mother’s art - the psychology or phi- losophy of Sigmund Freud,’ she wrote in ‘Advent.’ ‘I must find new words as the Professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet unrecorded states of mind or being!” ‘There had been recordings, ofcourse, Freud’s own orlike Otto Rank’s The Myth ofthe Birth of the Hero, which Freud shrewdly recommended to her when she told him of her dream of the Egyptian princess and the child afloat in the bulrushes. But Freud does, she wrote, ‘follow the workings of my creative mind.’ Freud knew she had to make her own recordings. No one else could do that forher. Freud had a passionate concern with the ontogeny of art. It was by no accident that the theo- sophist van der Leeuw and H.D. had contemporary hours on the Berggasse. “Tbegin intensive reading of psychoanalytic journals, books and study Sigmund Freud,’ she wrote in 1932, ‘Thereis talk of my possibly going to Freud himselfin Vienna.’ The one who principally talked was Freud’s distinguished student and member of the Circle, Dr. Hanns Sachs, whom H.D. had known in Berlin and with whom she had had sessions. Earlier than these, and less satisfactory, were some twenty-four ses- sions in 1931 in London with Mary Chadwick, to whom she had gone when the collapse ofa friend threatened her own col- lapse. Still earlier had been the informal conversations with Havelock Ellis in Brixton at the close of World War One. He had traveled, later, in 1920, on the same boat with Bryherand herself to Malta and Greece. The companionship seems to‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD have made no memorable impact on any of them. Disap- pointed in his indifference to her manuscript ‘Notes on ‘Thought and Vision, ’she remembered him chiefly in terms of Norman Douglas’ mot: ‘He isa man with one eye in the coun- try of theblind.’ In Freud’s fuller vision she found both stimulation and encouragement. Years later than either ‘Writing on the Wall” or‘Advent’ she returned again to his memory. The end of her life was near, and she was hospitalized with a broken hip. ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘as the Professor said, “there is always something more to find out.” I felt that he was speaking for himself (an informal moment as I was about to leave). It was almostasifsomething Thad said wasnew, thathe even felt that Iwas a new experience. He must have thought the same of everyone, but I felt his personal delight, I was new. Everyone else was new, every dream and dream association was new. After the years and years of patient, plodding research, it was all new.’ Newness was what happened to Freud’s bibelots and H.D’’s remembering when their contexts changed. We are always remaking history. Returning to the details of her childhood, in Freud’s consulting room, surrounded by his little treasures, she was redefining both her childhood and them. ‘My mother, my mother,” Icry,’ she noted ofa dream, ‘Isob violently, tears, tears, tears.’ Her mother was Moravian, and allied to the Mystery and to love feasts; her mother painted, she was musical, and it was she who gave his first musical training to her brother, H.D.’s uncle, J. Fred Wolle, who later studied organ and counterpoint in Munich and was, in H.D.’s Bethlehem childhood, organist of the Mora- vian church. He established the now seventy-five-year-old Bach Festivals for which Bethlehem is chiefly known today. H.D_’sgrandfather (Papalie), the Rev. Francis Wolle, was the author of Desmids of the United States (1884), the well-known FOREWORD Freshwater Algae of the United States (1887), and Diatomaceae of North America (1890). He used the microscope, but more sig- nificantly tohis family he had been for twenty years, until his retirement in 1881, head of the Moravian Seminary. H.D.’s ambience was Moravian. Her father was older and, as she repeatedly inferred, from ‘outside.’ H.D. was the child of the second marriage of a wid- ower. He was a middle-western New Englander; he taught mathematics; he was an astronomer who mapped the stars at nightand napped until noon. ‘Ineverhad aletter from him in my life, but our mother shared her letters from him, on rare occasions when he was away from home. He would write whimsical, rhymed verses sometimes.” ‘She was her father’s favorite, her older brother was her mother’s, she felt. ‘But the mother is the Muse, the Creator, and in my case especially, as my mother’s name was Helen,” ‘Obviously,’ she wrote in ‘Advent,’ ‘this is my inheritance. I derive my imaginative faculties through my musician-artist mother.’ But the inheritance was not simple. ‘ “My mother, my mother,” Try. ...” As she wrote elsewhere, ‘She only felt thatshe [was] disappointment toher father, an odd duckling toher mother.” Charles Doolittle was born in 1843. His first marriage took place in Michigan in 1866; his second, to Helen Wolle, in 1882, He was 43 when H.D. was born, and Professor of Math- ematics and Astronomy at Lehigh. From 1895 to 1912 he was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Flower Astronomical Observatory in Upper Darby, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He was a scientist with honorary degrees, and the author both of monographs on the results of observations with the Zenith telescope, and of Practical Astronomy as Applied to Geodesy and Navigation (1885). Hlis son Eric (1869-1920) succeeded him both to the profes- sorship and to the directorship of the observatory.‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD HD. as a girl sometimes thought of William Morris as a spiritual father. ‘This is the god-father that Inever had... . I did not know much about him until I was (as I say) about six- teen. Iwas given a book of his to read, by Miss Pitcher, at Miss Gordon’sschool;~alittle later, Ezra Pound read the poetry to me. The book Miss Pitcher gave me wason furniture, perhaps an odd introduction. But my father had made a bench for my room, some bookcases downstairs, from William Morris designs. My father had been a carpenter’s apprentice, as a boy. This “William Morris” father might have sent me to an art school but the Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics insisted on my preparing for college. He wanted eventually (he even said so) to make a mathematician of me, a research worker or scientist like (he even said so) Madame Curie. He did make a research worker ofme but in another dimension. It was a long time before I found William Morris and that was byaccident, though we are told that “nothing occurs acciden- tally.” T must choose, because my life depends upon it, between the artist and the scientist. I manage in the second yearof college to havea slight breakdown and I manage to get engaged to Ezra Pound.’ She made her choice. Her parents objected to Pound as a son-in-law. She had left Bryn Mawr, then she left Phila- delphia for New York, and then left New York for London. Henceforth she was alone. She wanted her mother but she wanted her father too. Both figured in her ‘legend.’ Her poem “Tribute to the Angels’ was written in the same year as‘Writ- ingon the Wall.’ Init she asks, ° what is this mother father totear at our entrails? what is this unsatisfied duality which you can not satisfy? FOREWORD “The house in some indescribable way,’ she wrote in ‘Advent,’ ‘depends on father-mother. At the point of integration or regeneration, there is no conflict over rival loyalties.” This was the integration she sought, the point at which she could say, having memory with understanding, ‘Iowned myself.” ‘The breaking-away, however, had been a necessary step. Looking back, in 1950, she wrote me, ‘I don’t suppose it was the fault of Bryn Mawr that I didn’t like it. My second year ‘was broken into or across by my affair with E.P., who after all, at that time, proved a stimulusand was the scorpionic ting or urge that got me away -at that timeit wasessential. [felt there Thad fallen between two stools, what with my mother’s musi- cal connection and my father’s and half-brother’s stars! I did find my path - thanks partly toE.P.,alsoR.A., Lawrence and the rest.” But she separated from Richard Aldington and, finally, divorced him. The story she has told in Bid Me to Live, Alding- ton had already given his version in Death ofa Hero, twas the subject of John Cournos’ Miranda Masters. D. H. Lawrence touched on it briefly in Aaron’s Rod. Few episodes have been so amply treated. Lawrence appears frequently in Tribute to Freud, especially with reference to his tory, ‘The Man Who Died.’ In Bid Me to Livehe playsasignificant role. He had the gloire. But her refer- ence in ‘Advent’ to their leave-taking is enigmatic: ‘ “I hope never to see you again,” he wrote in that last letter.’ Perhaps her comments to herself after reading Harry Moore’s biogra- phy of Lawrence have some relevance. Ihave read,’ she said, ‘the last two-thirds of the book, painstakingly reviewing my own feelings. I find confirmation of certain problems of my own, for instance, about Freud. Lawrence was instinctively against Sigmund Freud, Frieda was intelligently for him. But it was long before I had “come” to Freud that Frieda spoke toTRIBUTE TO FREUD me of “love.” It was in the Madrigal [Bid Me to Live] drawing- room, but did not come into my romance. Frieda and I were alone together in the big room, Frieda said that she had had a friend, an older man, who had told her that “if love is free, everything is free.” There had been the scene the night before or shortly before, in which Lawrence said that Frieda was there forever on his right hand, I was here forever—on hisleft. Frieda said when we were alone, “but Lawrence does not reallycare for women, Heonly caresfor men. Hilda, youhaveno ‘dea of what he is like.”” Pound’s belligerent disapproval of Freud cooled their friendship, though it was rewarmed during the St. Elizabeth years. An unpublished letter from Pound to H.D. in 1954 gives the tone of his disapproval. ‘I can’t blow everybodies’ noses for ’em,” he wrote. ‘Have felt yr / vile Freud all bunk / but the silly Xristers bury all their good authors / .. instead of sticking to reading list left by Dante / ...You got into the ‘wrong pig stye, ma chére. But not too late to climb out.”* Others never quite took the places of these three. Stephen Haden-Guest was a more casual friend. Arthur Waley was at best an acquaintance. Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher’s hus- band, was much closer. H.D. liked his novels as well as his company. With himas film director she acted with Paul Rob- ceson in Borderline. To Close-Up, of which Macpherson was an editor, she contributed articles on the cinema. But none of these, nor otherslater, had the gloire. Freud wasthe exception. ‘J.J. van der Leeuw wasa symbol rather thana person. H.D. in fact knew nothing but what she wrote about him in the two parts of Tribute to Freud, until in 1957 Icould by chance tell her more and send her some of his books. He was the author of the *The quotation from the letter from Pound to H.D. © 1974 by the Estate of Ezra Pound, FOREWORD often reprinted Gods in Exile, of The Fire of Creation, The Conquest oflltusion, and of The Dramatic History ofthe Christian Faith. Born in 1893, he joined the Theosophical Society in 1914, and was General Secretary of the Netherlands Section in 1930-1931. He founded the Practical Idealist Association for youth, and ‘was field organizer for the New Education Fellowship. He lived for a short while in Australia. Of how he reached the Berggasse there is no published record. Looking back, H.D. always remembered him there. ‘I wrote of J.J. van der Leeuw and the illness or breakdown had after heard of hisdeath in 1933. I connected him with my older brother and the fact that T could not “take” the fact of his death in action in France, because I was expecting this child ~ so later, with my father’s death. Death isall around us.” “Death and Birth - the great experiences,’ as H.D. described them. Emily Dickinson talks much about death. HLD. talks much about both - and about re-birth. Emily Dickinson was wonderfully feminine; H.D. was womanly. ‘One senses the fullness of her experiences, in Tribute to Freud, precisely as one feels the skilled warmth of Freud’s response. She would remember a person ot a phrase and exhibit it to Freud, as he in turn picked up the correlative artifact and symbol from his desk. ‘There,’ she wrote in 1955 in Kiisnacht, still remembering, in the print tacked to my wall above the ‘couch, piled high with itsheaps of books, manuscriptsand let- ters, sits the Professor at his desk. There arc books behind him and books and papers on his desk. There on his desk, too, area number of the images he so loved and treasured, perhaps (although I donot identify it) the very Egyptian Osiris that he once put intomy hands. “Thisis called the answerer,” he said, “because Osiris answers questions.”” \Writingon the wall posed questions. Osiris, with the help of Freud, showed the way to answers. It is as H.D. put it in her‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD Tribute ~ “The picture-writing, the hieroglyph of the dream, was the common property of the whole race; in the dream, man, as at the beginning of time, spoke a universal language, and man, meeting in the universal understanding of the unconscious or the subconscious, would forgo barriers of time and space; and man, understanding man, would save man- kind,’ Man would, could at least, write. Norman Homes Pearson New Haven, Connecticut July 1973 A NOTE ON THE TEXT “Writing on the Wall,’ to Sigmund Freud, blameless physi- cian, was written in London in the autumn of 1944, with no reference to the Vienna notebooks of spring 1933. “Writingon the Wall’ appeared in Life @ Letters Today, Lon- don, 1945 - 1946. ‘Advent,’ the continuation of ‘Writing on the Wall,’ or its prelude was taken direct from the old notebooks of 1933, though it wasnot assembled until December 1948, Lausanne. HD. WRITING ON THE WALL TO SIGMUND FREUD blameless physicianWRITING ON THE WALL Trwas vienna, 1933-1934. I had a room in the Hotel Regina, Freiheitsplatz. I had a small calendar on my table. [counted the days and marked them off, calculating the weeks. My ses- sions were limited, time went so quickly. As stopped to leave my key at the desk, the hall porter said, ‘Some day, will you remember me to the Professor?’ I said I would if the opportu- nity arose. He said, ‘-and ah, the Frau Professor! There is a wonderful lady.’ I said I had not met the Frau Professor but had heard that she was the perfect wife for him and there couldn’t be ~ could there? ~ a greater possible compliment. ‘The porter said, “You know Berggasse? After the — well, later when the Professor is no longer with us, they will name it Freudgasse.’ I went down Berggasse, turned in the familiar entrance; Berggasse 19, Wien IX, itwas. There were wide stone steps and a balustrade. Sometimes met someone else coming down. ‘The stone staircase was curved. There were two doors on the landing. The one to the right was the Professor's profes- sional door; the one to the left, the Freud family door. Appat- ently, the {wo apartments had been arranged so that there should be as little confusion as possible between family and patients or students; there was the Professor who belonged to us, there was the Professor who belonged tothe family; it wasa large family with ramifications, in-laws, distant relatives, family friends. There were other apartments above but I did not very often pass anyone on the stairs, except the analysand whose hour preceded mine.TRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘My hours or sessions had been arranged for me, four days a week from five to six; one day, from twelve to one. At least, that was the arrangement for the second series of sessions which, I have noted, began the end of October 1934. Ileft a number of books and letters in Switzerland when I left there, actually after the war had begun; among them was my 1933 Vienna diary. I am under the impression that the Professor had arranged the second series toaccord with the first, asThad often said to him that that near-evening hour was almost my favorite of the whole day. Anyhow, I had five weeks then. The last session was December 1, 1934. The first series began in March 1933 and lasted somewhat longer, between three and four months. I had not planned on coming back to Vienna, but a great deal had happened between the summer of 1933 and the autumn of 1934. I had heard the news of the Dollfuss affair with some anxiety, but that had notcaused any personal repercussions. I came back to Vienna because I heard about the man I sometimes met, coming down the stairs. He had been lecturing at a conference in Johannesburg. He flew his ‘ownplane there. On the way back, he crashed in Tanganyika. 2 [pip nor always pass him on the stairs. He might be lingering on, prolonging his talk in the Professor's study or consulting room, in which case, after hanging up my coat in the hall, I might miss him. I would be ushered direct into the waiting room. Orit might happen that my predecessor emerged from the Professor’s sanctum at the same time that I was about to enter. He would be reaching for his coat or his hat while I was disposing of mine. He was very tall, he looked English - yet Pa WRITING ON THE WALL English with a catch. He had, it later appeared, spent some time at Oxford, before or after receiving his Continental degree - in any case, he was not German, not American; but how does one know these things? He was, as it happened, exactly what I thought him, ‘English with a catch,’ in fact, a Dutchman. Tdid not know that his name was J. J. van der Lecuw until afterwards. Once he spoke to me at the Professor's bidding, about exchanging hours. That was a summer day in the big house outside the town, at Débling, where the family moved for the hot months. It would have been a day late in June or carly July 1933. The arrangement for receiving us there was more informal, and one did not have quite the same sense of authenticity or reality as in the Professor’s own home. How- ever, I did not say good-bye to Vienna in the house of a stranger on its outskirts. I came back. Ttold the Professor why I had come back. The Professor was seventy-seven at the time of our first sessions. I was forty- seven. Dr. van der Leeuw was considerably younger. He was known among them, the Professor told me, as the Flying Dutchman. He was an eminent scholar. He had come offi- cially to study with the Professor with the idea of the appli- cation of the principles of psychoanalysis to general ‘education, with the greater practical aim of international cooperation and understanding, He was wealthy, influential, well-born. He owned vast plantations in the Dutch East Indies and had traveled in India for the purpose of occult investigation. He had contacted a teacher or young devotee there, had been influenced by the Eastern teaching, but that had not satisfied him, He wanted toapply the lawsof spiritual being to the acute problems of today. It seemed to me that he ‘was the perfect man for the perfect job. The Professor had not told me that J. J. van der Leeuw was himself aware ofa deeply aoaTRIBUTE TO FREUD WRITING ON THE WALL rooted desire or subconscious tendency connected with his brilliant aviation. The Flying Dutchman knew that at any given moment, in the ir-hiselement he waslikely tofly too high, tfly too quickly. ‘That was really what concerned me,” said the Professor. ‘Iean tell younow that that was really what concerned us both.’ The Professor added, ‘After he lef, last time, [felt [had found the solution, I really had the answer, Butit was too late. Isaid tothe Professor, ‘Lalwayshad a feeling of satisfaction, of security when I passed Dr. van der Leeuw on the stairs or saw him in the hall. He seemed so self-sufficient, so poised ~ and you had told me about his work. [felt ll the time that he was the person who would apply, carry on the torch carry on your ideas, but not in a stereotyped way. I felt that you and your work and the future of your work were especially bequeathed to him. Oh, I know there is the great body of the Paycho-Analytical Association, research workers, doctors trained analysts, and so on! But Dr. van der Leeuw was differ. ent, [know that you have felt this very deeply. Teame back to Vienna to tell you how sorry Lam. The Professor said, You have come to take his place.” 3 1 pip Nor consciously think about the Flying Dutchman or connect him with my own work or weave him into my rever- ies. My own problems, my own intense, dynamic interest in the unfolding of the unconscious or the subconscious pattern, did not seem toinclude him. He wasso personable, o present. able, apparently so richly intellectually and materially endowed. I envied him, I think, his apparently uncompli- cated personality. He was an intellectual type but ‘externalized, the diplomatic or even business type; one did not think ofhim as tortured or troubled; thereseemed nothing of Sturm und Drang about him. He appeared scholarly, yes, but not in a bookish introverted sense. You would have said that his body fitted him as perfectly and as suavely as the grey or blue cloth that covered it; his soul fitted his body, you would have said, and his mind fitted his brain or his head; the fore- head was high, unfurrowed; hiseyes looked perceptive with a ‘mariner’s blue gaze, theeyes were ashade off orashade above blue-grey yet with that grey North Sea in them, Yes ~ cool, cold, perceptive yet untroubled, you would have said. When later came to thinkofit, yes, then t did seem that he was mer- curial, Mercury. Ido not think that the name of the winged messenger, Heer- mes of the Greeks, Mercury of the Romans, ever came up in my talks with the Professor, except once ina roundabout way when I had a dream sequence that included a figure from the famous Raphael Donner fountainin the Marktplatz. Thisisa very beautiful fountain with reclining figures of river gods, ‘vo worhen and two men. My dream was connected with a young man of my acquaintance in London; his name is not Brooks but his name does suggest streamsand riverssowe may call him Brooks. I connected this young Mr. Brooks with the figure of the younger of the male river gods in my dream sequence. It was then that I said to the Professor that the reclining bronze fountain figure had certain affinities with the poised Bolognese Mercury. We agreed that the Raphael Donner figure was the more attractive and original of the two, but that if you should raise the reclining river god and stand him on his feet, he might faintly resemble the Mercury - or in reverse, set the Mercury down to lean on his elbow and he might almost take the place of the bronze fountain figure. ItTRIBUTE TO FREUD wasin any case our Professor's charming way tofallin withan idea, todoit justice but not tooverstress unimportant details. For this seemed unimportant at the time Pethapsit isnot very important now. Itisinteresting, how- ever, to note in retrospect how the mind hedges away. Icon- nected the Raphael Donner figure, and by implication the Mercury, with a charming but not very important young London acquaintance, while the actual personable image is there in Vienna and was there ~had been there -recliningon this very couch, every hour just before my own session. As T say, I did not consciously think about Dr. van der Leeuw or weave him into my reveries. Nor did I think of him as Mer- cury, the Messenger of the Gods and the Leader of the Dead after he crashed , He was a stranger. I did not really know him. We had spoken once in the house at Dabling, outside Vienna, The Professor waved him across the large, unfamiliar drawing room, Dr. van der Leeuw bowed, he addressed me in polite, distinguished German, would the gnitdige Frau object to alter. ing her hour for one day, tomorrow? I answered him in English, I would not mind at all, ! would come at four, he at five. He thanked me pleasantly in friendly English, without a trace of accent. That was the frst and last time I spoke to the Flying Dutchman, We had exchanged ‘hours. 4 ‘Ture PROFESSOR was seventy-seven. His birthday in May was significant, The consulting room in the strange house con- tained some of his treasures and his famous desk. The room looked the same, except for the desk. Instead of the semicircle of priceless little objets d'art, there was a carefully arranged “8: WRITING ON THE WALL series of vases; each contained a spray of orchids or a single flower. I had nothing for the Professor. I said, ‘I am sorry, 1 haven't brought you anything because I couldn't find what 1 wanted.’ T said, ‘Anyway, I wanted to give you something dif- ferent.’ My remark might have seemed a shade careless, a shade arrogant. It might have seemed cither of these things, or both. Idonot know how the Professor translated it. He waved me to the couch, satisfied or unsatisfied with my apparently casual regard for his birthday. Thad not found what I wanted so I did not give him any- thing. In one of our talks in the old room at Berggasse, we had «gone off on one of our journeys. Sometimes the Professor knew actually my terrain, sometimes it was implicit in astatue or a picture, like that old-fashioned steel engraving of the Temple at Karnak that hung above the couch. [had visited that par~ ticular temple, he had not. But this time it was Italy; we were together in Rome. The years went forward, then backward. ‘The shuttle of the years ran a thread that wove my pattern into the Professor's. ‘Ah, the Spanish Steps,’ said the Profes- sor. ‘It was those branches of almond,’ I said; ‘ofall the flowers and the flower baskets, I remember those best.’ ‘But,’ said the Professor, ‘the gardenias! In Rome,even [couldafford towear ‘a gardenia,’ It was not that he conjured up the past and invoked the future. It was a present that was in the past or a past that was in the future. ‘Even Icould search Vienna fora single gardeniaoracluster of gardenias, But Icould not find them. Another year, I wrote from London, asking a friend in Vienna -an English student thereto makeaspecial effort to find acluster of gardenias for the Professor's birthday. She wrote back, ‘Iooked everywhere for the gardenias. But the florists told me that Professor Freud liked orchids and that people always ordered orchids for his birthday; they thought you would like to know. I'sent the orchids for you.” 9+‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD 5 In was sometime later that the Professor received my garde- nias, Itwas nota birthday, it was not Vienna. Ihad been tosee him in London, in new surroundings. He had arrived lately, an exile, It was a large house with a garden. There had been much discussion and anxiety concerning the Professor's famous collection of Greek and Egyptian antiquities and the various Chinese and other Oriental treasures. The boxes had atlast arrived, although the family expressed some doubt as to whether or not the entire treasure-trove, or even any of it, would be found intact. At least, the boxes had come, due to the influence and generosity of the Professor’s friend and dis- ciple, Madame Marie Bonaparte, the Princess George of Greece; ‘the Princess’ or ‘our Princess,’ the Professor called her. Ihad expressed surprise at secing several Greek figureson his desk. It seemed to be the same desk in a room that sug- gested that summer room in the house outside Vienna of my first visit in 1933. But this was autumn 1938, ‘How did you ‘manage to bring those from Vienna?” I asked him. ‘I did not bring them,’ hesaid. ‘The Princess had them waiting for mein Paris,so that Ishould feel at home there.’ It wasa treacherous, evil world but there was yet loyalty and beauty in it, It had been a flying, frightening journey. He had told me, five years before in Vienna, that traveling was even then out of the ques- tion for him. It was distinctly forbidden him by the distin- guished specialist who was always within beck and call. (If T am not mistaken, this devoted friend accompanied the Pro- fessor on his journey across the Continent.) It was difficult, seeing the familiar desk, the familiar new-old images on the desk there, to realize that this was London. Indeed, it was bet- ter to think of it in terms of a temporary slightly familiar “10 WRITING ON THE WALL divelling, as that summer houseat Dabling. This pleasant dis- trict was geographically, in a sense, to London, what Dabling had been to Vienna. But there was no return to Berggasse, Freudgasse that was to have been, 6 Bur in IMAGINATION at least, in the mist of a late afternoon, I could still continue a quest, a search. There might be garde- nias somewhere. I found them in a West End florist’s and scribbled on a card, ‘To greet the return of the Gods.’ The gar- denias reached the Professor. Ihave his letter. 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, N. W. 3 Noo. 28th, 1938 Dear H.D., got today some lowers. By chance or intention they are my favourite flowers, those I mast admire, Some words ‘to greet the return of the Gods? (other people read: Goods). No name. I suspect you tobe responsible for the gift. IfThave guessed right don’tanswer but accept my hearty thanks or so charming a gesture. In any case, focodhamingces ” affectionately yours, Sig. Freud 7 I ow.y saw the Professor once more. It was summer again. French windows opened on a pleasant stretch of lawn, The Gods or the Goods were suitably arranged on ordered shelves. arisicTRIBUTE TO FREUD Iwas not alone with the Professor. He sat quiet, alittle wistful it seemed, withdrawn. I was afraid then, as I had often been afraid, of impinging, disturbing his detachment, of draining his vitality. Thad no choice in the matter, anyway. There were others present and the conversation was carried on in an ordered, conventional manner. Like the Gods or the Goods, ‘we were seated in a pleasant circle; a conventionally correct, yet superficially sustained ordered hospitality prevailed. ‘There was a sense of outer security, at least no words were spoken to recall a devastatingly near past or to evoke an equivocal future. I was in Switzerland when soon after the announcement of a World at War the official London news bulletin announced that Dr. Sigmund Freud, who had opened up the field of the knowledgeof the unconscious mind, the innovator or founder of the science of psychoanalysis, was dead. 8 Tip onicivaLzy written had gone, but I crossed it out deliber- ately. Yes, he was dead. I was not emotionally involved. The Professor was an old man, He was eighty-three. The war was onus. Idid not grieve for the Professor or think of him. He was spared so much, He had confined his researches to the living texture of wholesome as well as unwholesome thought, but contemporary thought, you might say. That is to say, he had brought the past into the present with his the childhood of the individual is the childhood ofthe race~ orisit the other way round? = the childhood of the race is the childhood of the individual. In any case (whether or not, the converse also is true), he had opened up, among others, that particular field of the unconscious ‘mind that went to prove that the traits and tendencies of 12+ WRITING ON THE WALL obscureaboriginal tribes,as well asthe shapeand substance of the rituals of vanished civilizations, were still inherent in the human mind - the human psyche, if you will. But according to his theories the soul existed explicitly, or showed its form. and shape in and through the medium of the mind, and the body, as affected by the mind’s ecstasies or disorders. About the greater transcendental issues, we never argued. But there was an argument implicit in our very bones. We had come together in order to substantiate something. I did not know what. There was something that was beating in my brain;Ido not say my heart ~my brain. wanted it to be let out. I wanted tofree myself of repetitive thoughts and experiences ~ my own and those of many of my contemporaries. Idid not specifically realize just what it was Twanted, but I knew that I, like most of the people I knew, in England, America, and on the Conti- nent of Europe, was drifting. We were drifting, Where? I did not know but at least I accepted the fact that we were drifting. Atleast, [knew this~ I would (before the current of inevitable ‘events swept me right into the main stream and so on to the cataract) stand aside, ifT could (ifit werenot already too late), and take stock of my possessions. You might say that I had = yes, [had something that I specifically owned. Iowned myself. Idid not really, of course. My family, my friends, and my cir- cumstances owned me. But I had something. Say it was a nar- row birch-bark canoe. The great forest of the unknown, the supernormal or supernatural, was all around and about us. With the current gathering force, I could at least pull in to the shallows before it was too late, take stock of my very modest, possessions of mind and body, and ask the old Hermit who livedon the edge of this vast domain totalk tome, totell me, if he would, how best tosteer my course. We touched lightly on some of the more abstruse transcen- dental problems, itis true, but we related them to the familiar “136TRIBUTE TO FREUD family-complex. Tendencies of thought and imagination, however, werenot cutaway, were notprunedeven. My imagi, nation wandered at will; my dreams were revealing, and many of them drew on classical or Biblical symbolism, Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analyzed shelved, or resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unre. lated, were often found to be partofa special layer orstratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes skillfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and iridescent glass bowls and vases that sleamed in the dusk from the shelves ofthe cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped up on the couch in the room in Berggasse 19, Wien IX. The dead were living in so far as they lived in memory or were recalled in dream. 9 Inany case, affectionately yours... 1 did not know what enrages him suddenly. I veered round off the couche my feecon he floor. I do not know exactly what I had said, I have certain notes that I jotted down while in Vienna, butI never worked them over and have barely glanced at them since. I do not want to become involved in the strictly historical sequence. | wish torecall the impressions, orrather I wish the impressions torecall me. Let the impressions comein their own way, make their own sequence. “There will be plenty of memoirs about the Professor,” Walter Schmideberg said to me. ‘I expect Sachsand the Princess have already done theirs” ‘The analyst Schmideberg spoke ironically; he was a young Austrian officeron the Russian front, in the First World War captain of horses’ ashe described himselfto mein theearlies mia WRITING ON THE WALL days before his English had become so set. ‘Captain of horses’ conveyed more to me than ‘cavalry officer’ or ‘officer of the guards’; just as ‘needle-tree,’ to which he referred one day, than ‘pine’ oreven ‘evergreen.’ So the impact ofalanguage, as well as the impact of an impression may become ‘correct,’ become ‘stylized, lose its living quality. Itiseasy tobe caught, like Schmideberg, in the noose of self-criticism, it is easy to say, ‘Everybody will be scribbling memoirs,’ but the answer to thats, ‘Indeed yes, but neither the Princess George of Greece nor Dr. Hanns Sachs aforetime of Vienna and Berlin, later of Boston, Massachusetts, can scribble exactly myimpressions of the Professor.’ Moreover, I don’t think anyone could give usa more tender, humorous account of the Professor (ie would let the impressions carry him out of himself ) than the former young Rittmeister Schmideberg, who became the world’s adept at smuggling cigars to Berggasse during the darkest days of that war, and with whom the Professor kept faith dur- ing his bitter year of confinement in an Italian prison-camp, ironically after the war had ended. 10 So much For the Princess, Hanns Sachs, and Walter Schmideberg, the one-time Rittmeister of the 15th Imperial Austro-Hungarian Hussars of His Royal Highness, Archduke Francis Salvator. For myself, I veer round, uncanonically seated stark upright with my feet on the floor. The Professor himself is uncanonical enough; he is beating with his hand, ‘with his fist, on the head-piece of the old-fashioned horsehair sofa that had heard more secrets than the confession box of any popular Roman Catholic father-confessor in his heyday. +15:TRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘This was the homely historical instrument of the origi scheme of psychotherapy, of psychoanalysis, the science: ihe unravelling of the tangled skeins of the unconscious mind and thehealing implicit in the process. Consciously, lwas not aware of having said anything that might account for the Professor's outburst. And even as I veered around, facing him, my mind was detached enough to wonder if this was some idea of his for speeding up the analytic content or redirecting the flow of associated images. The Professor said, ‘The trouble i anold man you do not think it worth your while to love me.” -Tam 11 ‘Tie impact of his words was too dreadful -I simply felt noth- ing at all. I said nothing. What did he expect me to say? Exactly it was as ifthe Supreme Being had hammered with hisfiston the back of the couch where I had been lying. Why, anyway, did he do that? He must know everything or he didn’t know anything. He must know what I felt. Maybe he did, maybe that was what this wasall about. Maybe, anyway, itwas just a trick, something to shock me, to break something in myself of which I was partially aware ~ something that would not, must not be broken. Iwas here because I must not be broken. IfT were broken, I could not go on here with the Professor. Did he think it was easy to leave friendly, comfort- able surroundings and come to a strange city, to beard him, himself, the dragon, in his very den? Vienna? Venice? My ‘mother had come here on her honeymoon, tired, having ‘done’ Italy asa bride, Maybe my mother wasalready shelter. ing the child, girl, that frst child that lived such a very short time. Itwas the bread she talked of, Vienna and how she loved the different rolls and the shapes of them and ones with “16+ WRITING ON THE WALL poppy-seeds and Oh - the coffee! Why had I come to Vienna? “The Professor had said in the very beginning that I had come to Vienna hoping to find my mother. Mother? Mamma. But my mother was dead. I was dead; that is, the child in me that had called her mamma was dead. Anyhow, he was a terribly frightening old man, too old and too detached, too wise and too famous altogether, to beat that way with his fist, like a child hammering a porridge-spoon on the table. slid back onto the couch. You might say I sneaked back. With due deliberation and the utmost savoir-faire, I re- arranged the rug that had slid to the floor. The couch was slip- pery, the head-piece at the back was hard. I was almost too long; if T were a little longer my feet would touch the old-fash- ioned porcelain stove that stood edge-wise in the corner. The ‘Niimberg Stove was a book that my mother had liked. I could not remember a single incident of the book and would not take the time to go through all the intricacies of explaining to the Professor that I was thinking of book called The Niimberg ‘Stove. Itwas ll very obvious; there was thestove, throwing out its pleasantly perceptible glow, there was thestoveitselfin the corner. Isaw the porcelain stove and I thoughtofa book called The Mimberg Stove, but why take up time going into all that, anyway? ‘There was the stove, but there were moments when one felt alittlechilly. Ismoothed the foldsof the rug, I glanced surrep- titiously at my wristwatch. The other day the Professor had reproached me for jerking out my arm and looking at my watch, He had said, ‘I keep an eye on the time - I will tell you when the session is over. You need not keep looking at the time, as ifyou were in a hurry to get away.’ [fingered thestrap of my watch, I tucked my cold hands under the rug. I always found the rug carefully folded at the foot of the couch when T came in. Did the little maid Paula come in from the hall and fold the rug or did the preceding analysand fold it, as I always “7TRIBUTE TO FREUD carefully did before leaving? I was preceded by the Flying Dutchman; he probably left the rug just anyhow - a man would. Should I ask the Professor if everybody folded the rug on leaving, or if only I did this? The Professor had said in the beginning that he classed me in the same category as the Fly- ing Dutchman - we were students. I was a student, working under the direction of the greatest mind of this and of perhaps many succeeding generations. But the Professor was not always right. 12 I pip xor argue with the Professor. In fact, as I say, I did not have the answer. Ifhe expected to rouse me to some protesta- tion of affection, he did not then sueceed in doingso - the root orthecurrentran toodeep. Oneday he said, ‘Today we have tun- neledvery deep. "One day he said, Istruck oil. It was I whostruck oil. But the contents of the oil wells have only just been sam- pled. There is oil enough, material enough for research and exploitation, to last fifty years, to last one hundred years - or longer.’ He said, ‘My discoveries are not primarily a heal-all. My discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy. There are very few who understand this, there are very few who are capable of understanding this.’ One day he said to me, ‘You dis- covered for yourself what I discovered for the race.’ To all that, Iwill hope to return later. At the moment, Iam lyingon the couch. I have just readjusted the rug that had slipped to the floor. Ihave tucked my hands under the rug. lam wonder- ing if the Professor caught me looking at my wristwatch. Tam. really somewhat shattered. But there is no answering flare- back. “18: WRITING ON THE WALL 13 ‘Ture 1s the old-fashioned porcelain stove at the foot of the ‘couch. My father had a stove of that sort in the outdoor office or study he had had built in the garden of my first home ‘There was a couch there, too, and a rug folded at the foot. It too had a slightly elevated head-piece. My father’s study was lined with books, as this reom was. There was a smell of leather, the crackling of wood in the stove, as here. There was one picture, a photograph of Rembrandt’s Dissection, and a skull on the top of my father’s highest set of shelves. There was a white owl under a bell-jar. I could sit on the floor with a doll ora folder of paper dolls, but I must notspeak to him when he was writing at his table, What he was ‘writing’ was rows and rows of numbers, but I could then scarcely distinguish the shape of a number from a letter, or know which was which. I ‘must not speak to my father when he lay stretched out on the couch, because he worked at night and so must not be dis- turbed when he lay down on the couch and closed his eyes by day. But now it is T who am lying on the couch in the room lined with books. Butno, there are not many booksin thisroom; it isthe other room that is lined with books. The window in this room and the one in the other room look out on toa courtyard, I believe. Lam not sure of this. Itisquiethere, anyway. There isnosound of traffic from the street, no familiar household soundsas from the Freud-family side of the house. We are quite alone here in this room. But there are two rooms really, though the room beyond is almost part of this room with the wide-parted doubledoors. There is dusk and darkness beyond, through the parted double doors to the right of the stove, as I lie here. “19TRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘There is the door across the room that opens in from the little waiting room. There is the other door, at right angles, the exit door. It leads through a rather dark passage or a little room that suggests a pantry or laboratory. Then there is the hall beyondit, where we hang our coats on pegs thatsomehow sug- gest school or college. The Flying Dutchman has been and gone. Not only are we alike in our relation to the Professor, as seekers or ‘students’ as he calls us, but we bear the same rela- tion to the couch that I am lying on. When, in the beginning, I expressed a slight embarrassment at being ‘almost too tall,’ the Professor put me at ease by saying that the analysand who preceded me was ‘actually considerably taller.” 14 My arorneris considerably taller. Lam five andhe isseven, or Lam three and he is five. It issummer. The grass is somewhat drry,a few leaves crackle under our feet. They have fallen from pear tree that has large russet pears. The pears have been gathered. (Pears? Pairs?) There is a tree opposite this, that has small yellow pears; they ripen earlier. The tree next our tree is acrab-apple tree and there isa slice of a large log underit. The logis like a round table or a solid thick stool. It is oo heavy for Us to move, but Eric, our half-brother (a grown man to us), shifted it easily. We saw what was under the heavy immov- able log. There was a variety of entertaining exhibits; small things like ants moved very quickly; they raced frantically around but always returned to the same ridge of damp earth or tiny lump of loam. In neatly sliced runnels, some white, wingless creatures lay curled. The base of the log had been the roof of a series of little pockets or neat open graves, rather like ‘Aztec or Egyptian burial-chambers, but I did not know that. +20: WRITING ON THE WALL ‘These curled, white slugs were unborn things. They were repulsive enough, like unlanced boils. Or it is possible that they were not essentially repulsive - they might be cocoonless larvae, they might ‘hatch’ sometime. But I only saw them, I did not know what they were or what they might portend. My brother and I stood spellbound before this disclosure. Eric watched the frantic circling of the ants attentively. Then he set the log back carefully, so as to crush as few of the beasts as possible, so as to restore, if possible, the protective roof over the heads of the white slugs. ‘There were things under things, as well as things inside things. 15 Bur ruar was another occasion. This time, Iam alone with my brother, who is considerably taller. He had summoned me. He had a strip of newspaper in his hand. He had a mag- nifying glass that he must actually have taken from our father’s table. He told me to look and I saw the print on the flimsy news-sheet grown larger, but I knew the glass did this. I did not know why he had toshow me this news-print. Idid not read, If he wanted to show me something, it should be some- thing more attractive, more suitable altogether. ‘Don’t go away,’ hesaid, it will happen ina minute.’ The sun was hot on our backs. The pear branch cast its late-summer shadow toward the crab-apple tree. ‘Now, hesaid. Under the glass, on the paper, a dark spot appeared; almost instantaneously the newspaper burst into lames. It was inevitable that a tall, bearded figure should appear from the Ark-like doorof the outdoorstudy. The study was not flat on the ground but set on a series of square stone pillar-like foundations. Our father came down the steps. This picture 21+TRIBUTE TO FREUD could be found in an old collection of Bible illustrations or thumbed-over discarded reproductionsof, say, theearly nine- teenth-century French painter, David. It is a period piece, certainly. Yet its prototype can be found engraved on Graeco- Roman medallions or outlined against the red or black back- ground of jars or amphorae of the classic Greek period. I have said that from my reclining yet propped-up, somewhat Madame Récamier-like position on the couch, I face the wide-open double door. At the foot of the couch is the stove Placed next the stove is the cabinet that contains the more delicate glass jars and the variously shaped bottles and Aegean vases. In the walll space, on the other side of the double door, is another case or cabinet of curiosities and antiques; on top of this case there are busts of bearded figures - Euripides? Socrates? Sophocles, certainly. There is the window now as you turn that corner, at right angles to this cabinet, and then another case that contains pottery figures and some more Greek-figure bowls, Then, the door to the waiting room. At tight angles again, there is the door that leads through the lab- oratory-like cupboard-room or alcove, to the hall. These two last doors, the entrance door and the exit door, as I call them, are shut. The wall with the exit door is behind my head, and seated against that wall, tucked into the corner, in the three- sided niche made by the twowalls and the backof the couch, is the Professor. He will it there quietly, like an old ow! ina tree. He will say nothing at all or he will lean forward and talk about something that is apparently unrelated to the progres- sionor unfolding ofour actual dream-content or thought asso- ciation. He will shoot out an arm, sometimes somewhat alarmingly, to stress a point. Or he will, always making an ‘occasion’ of it, get up and say, ‘Ah - now - we must celebrate ‘his, and proceed to the elaborate ritual -selecting, lighting - +22: WRITING ON THE WALL until finally he seats himself again, while from the niche rises the smoke of burnt incense, the smoldering of his mellow, fra- grant cigar. 16 Lencri, axeaprn, thickness, the shape, the scent, the feel of things. The actuality of the present, its bearing on the past, their bearing on the future. Past, present, future, these three ~ but there is another time-clement, popularly called the fourth-dimensional. The room has four sides. There are four seasons to a year. This fourth dimension, though it appears variously disguised and under different subtitles, described and elaborately tabulated in the Professor’s volumes ~ and still more elaborately detailed in the compilations of his fol- lowers, disciples, and pseudo-disciples and imitators ~ is yet very simple, It is as simple and inevitable in the building of time-sequence as the fourth wall to a room. If we alter our course around this very room where I have been talking with the Professor, and start with the wall tomy left, against which the couch is placed, and go counter-clockwise, we may num- ber the Professor's wall with the exit door 2, the wall with the entrance door (the case of pottery images and flat Greek bowls) 3, and the wall opposite the couch 4. This wall actually is largely unwalled, as the space there is left vacant by the wide-open double doors. The room beyond may appear very dark or there may be broken light and shadow. Or even bodily, one may walk into that room, asthe Professor invited me todo one day, tolook at the things on his table.TRIBUTE TO FREUD 17 (On sty Fatien’s table there were pens and ink-bottles and a metal tray for holding the pens. He used different pens for his different inks, black and red. There was a paper-knife of Chi- nese or pseudo-Chinese design; a squat figure was the handle; a jar or pot on the grotesque’s head held a blade that was the Paper-knife, though a fret-work in low relief of leavesand ten- drils gave the blade of the paper-knife an added dimension; the paper-knife was a paper-knife, at the same time it was a flat tree or pole with delicate tendrils worked over it or through it. There was an oversize pair of desk-shears, several Paper-weights; one of glass showed different pictures reflected init, ifyou looked into it ina certain light. It was just glass, it was a paper-weight, but it was a set of prismatic tri- angles, placed on another set of triangles. When you put it down, it always lay sideways; the peak, where one set of tri- angles met, pointed to the north pole or the south pole, or might have so pointed. There is the magnifying glass which my brother isstill holding in his hand. 18 ‘Bur vou know, you children are never to play with matches.” Iwas one of the unforgivable sins. (Matches?) My brother has the answer. The answer is a brave, pert rejoinder, ‘But we aren't playing with matches.’ Hee does not give the answer. I stand beside him, My brother is very tall. My head scarcely reaches his shoulder. I have seen the round glass in its metal frame; the straight handle is clasped by a damp, somewhat +24. WRITING ON THE WALL grubby paw, behind my brother’s back. Ido not know, he does not know that this, besides being the magnifying glass from our father’s table, isa sacred symbol. Itisa circle and the stem ofthe circle, the stalk or support of this flower, is the handle of the glass that my brother is clasping behind his back. This is the sacred ankh, the symbol of life in Egypt, but we do not know this - or perhaps our father does know this. He used this very sign, the circle with the supporting straight line, with an added little line, a cross, to indicate the planet Venus. I donot know ifour father knows that the ankhis the symbol of life and that the sign he often uses at the head of one of his columns of numbers is the same sign. He writes columns and columns of numbers, yet at the top of one column he will sketch in a hier- oglyph; it may stand for one of the Houses or Signs of the Zodiac, or it may be a planet simply: Jupiter or Mars or ‘Venus. I did not know this when I stood beside my brother in the garden. I knew ita long timeafter but I didnot understand it. It is only now as I write this that I see how my father pos- sessed sacred symbols, how he, like the Professor, had old, old sacred objects on his study table. But the shape and form of these objects, sanctified by time, were not so identified. They ‘were just a glass paper-weight, just a brass paper-knife or the ordinary magnifying glass that my brother is still holding in hishand. ‘What will my brother say? He cannot say, ‘I brought fire from heaven.’ He cannot answer father Zeus in elegant iam- bics and explain how he, Prometheus, by his wit and daring, by his love of the unknown, by his experimentation with occult, as yet unexplainable forces, has drawn down fire from the sky. Itisan actual fact. But my brother has never heard of Prometheus, he doesn’t know any Greek. He has taken the magnifying glass from our father’sstudy table and thats, pos- sibly, a sin, second only to playing with matches. My father 125+TRIBUTE TO FREUD stamps on the flimsy charred paper. There is the smell of burnt paper and the faint trail ofsmoke in the still air ofa late- summer day of the afternoon of the year (perhaps) 1889 or (perhaps) 1901 Idonot remember what my brother says to my father, what my father in his turn says to my brother. ‘You must not do it again’ is implicit anyway. But the ordinary words of their common speech are sometimes above my head. I do not alwayseven understand the words my brother uses. He isa big boyand known to be quaint and clever forhisage. [ama small girl and small for my age and not very advanced. Iam, in a sense, still a foreigner. There are other foreigners; they arrive from time to time, in our own house, in our grandfather's house (which is shared by an aunt and uncle), in the house across the street, in other houses, up and down Church Street. ‘These foreigners know even less than I do of the customs of these people about us - civilized or barbaric people. Things happen that these people try to hide from us; a boy drowns in the river, a workman at the steel mill loses a limb, a foreigner or, as they say sometimes at the back door, ‘a little stranger’ hhas arrived somewhat prematurely somewhere. Alll these mysterious, apparently unrelated events, overheard hiding under the kitchen table, or gathered or inferred, whispering with other inarticulate but nonetheless intuitively gifted fel- low-whisperers of one's own age, and sometimes a little older, up and down Church Street, have to do with, or in some way suggest, a doctor. 19 A vocror Hasa bag with strange things init, steel and knives and scissors. Our father is not a doctor but he has a doctor's +26 WRITING ON THE WALL picture or a picture of doctors in his study. He is quiet and strangely tender when we are ill. He likes to tell people that he hesitated for a time before deciding on his profession, that doctorsalways ay he should have been one of them. His voice isquiet and even and low-pitched. His voice is almost monot- onously quiet. He never raises his voice. He is never irritable or angry. I never saw him really angry except two or three times in my whole life, and those were memorable occasidns. Lying on this couch in the Professor's room, I feel that some- time I must recall and annotate (asit were) my father’s anger. But this is not one of those occasions. My father is not angry now but, though the sun i \gand the burnt paper smol- dering at our feet, there is an icy chill in the air. ‘Perhaps,’ he may have said (for our father isa just man), ‘I did not actually forbid you taking the magnifying glass,’ for my brotherhas now handed it back to him. ‘I know that I have told you not to touch the ink-stand or take away the desk-shears or use the paste-pot for your paper soldiers. It was understood, I thought, that you did not disturb anything on my table.” ‘There is frost in the air. I sidle nearer to my brother. Iam implicated, though in no way blamed 20 ‘Ture 1s an earlier occasion and again the sun is shining. From the cloth dress my mother wears, I think it must be spring, or it isan Indian-summer day, between seasons at any rate, formy mother wears a cloth dress without a coat. Itisnot summer, for we go into summer clothes as regularly and as inevitably as people in the tropics. We aresubtropic, atown in Pennsylvania, on the map’ s parallel, Ibelieve, south of Rome. 27+‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD Winters are cold, summers are hot, so we have the tempera- ment of Nordics and of southerners both, harmoniously blended and altering key or vibration in strict accordance with the seasons’ rules - or not, as may be. It is summer any- way in my mother’s face, for she is laughing. We have been out with her to help her with the shopping or to drop in on one of her many relatives or friends. The town, contains scarcely anyone who is not a relative or friend - the ‘old town’ at any rate; and this is the old town, for we are seated on aslight elevation of the pavement, on thecurb-stone as it makes a generous curve off Church Street, under the church and on to the stores and hotel and shopping centers of Main Street - I think it was called Main Street; it should be, anyway. It seems odd that my mother should be laughing. My brother has defied her. He isseated firm on thecurb-stone. He is not going home. As he repeats this solemnly, my mother laughs more. People stop and ask what has happened. My mother tells them and they laugh too. They stand either side of my mother, more people, friends and strangers, all laugh- ing. ‘But we're collecting a crowd,’ she says, ‘we can’t stay here, crowding the pavement. She obtains supporters; strangers and near-strangers repeat her words like a Greek chorus, following the promptings of their leader. ‘Thereisa slight, whispered conspiracy. The strangers melt away and my mother, with feigned indifference, strolls off. My brother knows perfectly well that she will relent, she will pretend to go away but she will wait around the comer, and if wedon’t follow her she will come back. He has told her that he is going away to live by himself, and he has moreover told her that his sister is coming with him. His sister waits anxiously, excited yet motionless, on the curb beside him. In addition to this inal ultimatum of my brother's, we were not supposed to siton the curb-stone. But there we sit, not ‘crowding the pave- +28 WRITING ON THE WALL ment’ but makinga little group, design, an image at the cross- roads. It appears variously in Greek tragedies with Greek namesand it can be found in your original Grimm’s talesorin your nursery translation, called Little-Brother, Little-Sister. ‘Oneissometimes the shadow of the other; often one islost and the one seeks the other, as in the oldest fairy tale of the twin- brother-sister of the Nile Valley. Sometimes they are both boys like the stars Castor and Pollux, sometimes there are ‘more than two. Actually in the case of Castorand Pollux there were four, with Helen and Clytemnestra - the children of a Lady, we are told, and a Swan. They make a group, a con- stellation, they make groove ora pattern into which or upon which other patterns fit, or are placed unfitted and are cut by circumstance to fit. In any case, itisa common-or-garden pat- tern though sometimes it finds its corresponding shape in heaven. And theirmother has walked away. Heknows that she will come back because he is older and is admittedly his ‘mother’s favorite, But she does not know this, But though her brainisin a turmoil of anxiety and pride and terror, it has not ‘even occurred to her that she might throw her small weight into the balance of conventional behavior by following her mother and leaving her brother to his fate. 21 ‘Tuese pictures are so clear. They are like transparencies, set before candles in a dark room. I may or may not have men- tioned these incidents to the Professor. But they were there. Upon the elaborate build-up of past memories, across the intricate network made by the hair-lines that divided one irregular bit of the picture-puzzle from another, there fell +29:TRIBUTE TO FREUD inevitably a shadow, a writing-on-the-wall, a curve like a reversed, unfinished $ and a dot beneath it, a question mark, the shadow ofa question — is his it? The question mark threat. ened to shadow the apparently most satisfactory answers. No answer was final. The very answerheld something of death, of finality, of Dead Sea fruit. The Professor’s explanations were too illuminating, it sometimes seemed; my bat-like thought- wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight. Or reversely, other wings (gull or skylark) that seemed about to take me right out of the lower levels of the commonplace would find themselves beating in the confined space of a wicker cage, or useless under the mesh of a bird net. But no ~ he did notset traps, he did not really fling nets. Itwas I myself, by my own subconscious volition or unconscious will, who walked or flew into them. I over-stressed or over-com- pensated; I purposely and painfully dwelt on certain eventsin the past about which I was none too happy, lest l appear to be dodging the analysis or trying to cheat the recorder of the Book of Life, to deceive the Recording Angel, in fact, in an effort to escape the Day of Judgment. Once when I painfully unravelled a dingy, carelessly woven strip of tapestry of cause and effect and related to him, in over-careful detail, some none-too-happy friendships, he waved it all aside, not bored, not grieved or surprised, but simply a little wistful, I thought, asif we had wasted precious time, or precious hours together, onsomething that didn’t matter. ‘But why, heasked, ‘did you worry about all this? Why did you think you had to tell me? Those two didn’t court, But you felt you wanted to tell your mother.” Alll this seemed almost too simple at the time. My mother was dead; things had happened before her death, ordinary as well as incredible things, that I hadn’t told her. In some cases, Iwanted to spare her worry and pain, as during the period of +30 WRITING ON THE WALL the First World War when I was in England and she was in ‘America. Then there was her personal bereavement to con- sider; the death of my father followed closely on the news of the death of my older brother in France. My father, a boy of seventeen, and his older brother had been soldiers in our American Civil War and my father had lost this only brother in that war; he was a mathematician, an astronomer, detached and impartial, a scholar or savant, to use the more colorful French word, But the news of the death in action of my brother in France brought ona stroke. My fathered, lit- erally, from the shock. The Professor had had shock upon shock, But he had not died. ; ‘My father was seventy-four or seventy-five when he died — at any rate, not as old as the Professor was now. My mother had had her seventieth birthday in the early twenties. She stayed with me for some years in London and in Vaud, Swit- zerland, She went back on a visit to America. I knew that she would die there; she knew it too. But I wanted toavoid think- ing about this. I did not want to face this. There are various ways of trying to escape the inevitable. You can go round and round in circles like the ants under that log that Erie pried up for us. Or your psyche, your soul, can curl up and sleep like those white slugs. 22 Those two didn’t count. There were two's and two's and two's in my life. There were the two actual brothers (the three of us ‘were born within four years). There were the two half-broth- crs; there were the two tiny graves of the two sisters (one of those was a half-sister but there were the two or twin-graves) “31+TRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘There were the two houses, ours and our grandparents’ in the same street, with the same garden. There were the two Bibli- cal towns in Pennsylvania, Bethlehem where I was born, and Philadelphia, where we moved when I was eight. There were fora time inconsciousness two fathersand two mothers, for we thought that Papalie and Mamalie (our mother's parents) were our own ‘other’ father and mother, which, in fact, they were. ‘There were two of everybody (except myself) in that first house on Church Street. There were the two brothers who shared the same room; the two half-brothers might turn up at any time, together; there were the two maids who slept in the room over the kitchen; there were my two parents in their room. (There was a later addition to this Noah’s Ark, but my last brother arrived after this pattern was fixed in consciousness.) My father had married two times; so again, there were two wives, though onewas dead. Then in later life, there were two countries, America and England as it happened, separated by a wide gap in con- sciousnessand avery wide stretch ofsea. The sea grows narrower, the gap in consciousness some- times seems negligible; nevertheless there is a duality, the English-speaking peoples are related, brothers, twins even, but they are not one. Soin me, twodistinet racial or biological oF psychological entities tend to grow neareror toblend, even, as time heals old breaks in consciousness. My father’s second wife was the daughter of a descendant of one of the original Sroups of the early-eighteenth-century, mystical Protestant order, called the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian or Moravian Brotherhood. Our mother’s father was part mid-European by race, Polish I believe the country called itself then, when his forefathers left it, though it became German and then fluctu. +32 WRITING ON THE WALL ated like the other allied districts back and forth as in the ear- lier days of the Palatinate struggles. Livonia, Moravia, Bohemia - Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the renewed Bohemian brotherhood, was an Austrian, whose father was exiled or self-exiled to Upper Saxony, because of his Protes- tant affiliations. The Professor himself was an Austrian, a Moravian actually by birth. 23 Moriter? Fariter? We have met one of them in the garden of the house on Church Street and we haveseen theother further down Church Street, where the pavement makes a generous curve under the church on to the shops. But we are not shop- ping. We are not calling on anyone, friend or near-friend or near or distant relative, Everyone knows our mother so we are never sure whois related and whois not -well,in asense every- oneisrelated for there isthe church and weall belong together in some very special way, because of our candle service on Christmas Eve which is not like what anyone else has any- where, exceptin some places in Europe perhaps. Europeis far away and is a place where our parents went on their honey- moon. Itis she who matters for she is laughing, not so much at ‘usas with or over usand around us. Stehas bound music folios and loose sheets on the top of our piano. About her, there is no question. The trouble is, she knows so many people and they come and interrupt. And besides that, she likes my brother better. IF I stay with my brother, become part almost of my brother, perhaps I can get nearer to her. But one can never get near enough, or if one gets near, i because one has measles orscarlet fever. [fone could stay near her always, there would be no break in consciousness ~ but +33TRIBUTE TO FREUD half a loaf is better than no bread and there are things, not altogether negligible, to be said for him. He has some mys- terious habits, this going out at night and sleeping on the couch in his study by day. Asfaras that goes, there ishisstudy. Provided you do not speak to him when he is sitting at his table, or disturb him when he is lying down, you are free to come and go. It is a quiet place. No one interferes or inter- rupts. His shelves are full of books, the room is lined with books. There is the skullon the top of the highest bookcase and the white owl under a bell-jar. He has more books even than. our grandfather and he has that triangle paper-weight that shows the things in the room repeated and in various dimen- sions. This, of course, I have not at the time actually put into words, hardly put into thoughts. But here Iam, in some spe- cial way privileged. It is his daughter to whom he later en- trusts the paper-knife; he leaves his uncut magazines and periodicals for her. She knows how to run the paper-knife carefully along under the surface of the double page, and this is especially important as her older brother is not invited to cut the pages. He has, of course, many other things todo. Our mother is a mixture of early Pennsylvania settlers, people from this island, England, and others from middle Europe ~ he is one thing. He is New England, though he does not live there and was not born there. He comes from those Puritan fathers who wear high peaked hatsin the Thanksgiving num- bers of magazines. They fought with Indians and burned witches. Their hats were like the hats the doctors wore, in the only picture that was hanging in his study. The original pic- ture was by Rembrandt, if Tam not mistaken. The half-naked manon the table was dead so it did not hurt him when the doc- tors sliced his arm with a knife or a pair of scissors. Is the pi ture called A Lesson in Anatomy? 134+ WRITING ON THE WALL It does not really matter what the picture is called. It is about doctors. There isa doctor seated at the back of the couch. on which I am lying. He is a very famous doctor. He is called Sigmund Freud. 24 We travel rar in thought, in imagination or in the realm of memory. Events happened as they happened, notall of them, of course, but here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, isreal, is like a work of art or isa work of art. I have spoken of the two scenes with my brother as remaining set apart, like transparencies in a dark room, set before lighted candles. Those memories, visions, dreams, reveries - or what you will - are different. Their texture is dif- ferent, the effect they have on mind and body is different. ‘They are healing. They are real. They are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery of clay objects that fill the cases around the walls, that are set in elegant precision in a wide arc on the Professor's table in the other room, But we cannot prove that they are real. We can discriminate as a connoisseur (as the Professor does with his priceless collection here) between the false and the true; a good copy of a rare object is not without value, but we must distinguish between a faithful copy and a spurious imitation; there are certain alloys too that may cor- rode and corrupt in time, and objects so blighted must be seg- regated or scrapped; there are priceless broken fragments that ‘are meaningless until we find the other broken bits to match them. ‘There are trivial, confused dreams and there are real dreams. The trivial dream bears the same relationship to the 235+ | | | | | | | | | |TRIBUTE TO FREUD real asa column of gutter-press news-print toa foi play of Shakespeare, Thedreamsaresevariedasarethebocka we read, the pictures we look at, or the people we meet. reams ~ we know where you Freudians think your dreams ome from!" Your young men shall se visions and your old men shall dream dreams. A great many of them come fromthe samesource as the script or Scripture, the Holy Writ or Word. And there too we read of Joteph, how his brethren scoffed, Bell hs With the Professor, I discussed a few re intermediate dreams that contained al tong hieroglyph’ linked with authentic images, and some quaint, trivial, mocking dreams that danced, as it were, like macque, rading sweeps and May queens round the Maypole. But the most luminovs, the most clearly defined of all the dream tent while Iwas wi rofessor m tentwhle Iwas with the Profesor was th dreamt the Prin 25 Sue wasa dark lady. She wore aclear-colored robe, yellow o faint-orange. It was wrapped round her asin one piece, like a sari worn as only a high-caste Indian lady could wear it. But she's not Indian, she is Egyptian. She appearsat the top ofa long staircase; marblesteps lead down toa river. She wearers ornament, no ciclet or scepter shows her rank, but anyone Youldknow thisisa Pines Down, down the steps comes She will not tum back, she will not top, she wil not alter the rhythm of her pace. She has nothing in her arms, there i no one with her; thee is no extraneous object with her or about her or about the carved steps to denote any symbolic +36 WRITING ON THE WALL detail or side issue involved. There is no detail. The steps are geometrical, symmetrical and sheisasabstractasa lady could be, yet she isa real entity, areal person. I, the dreamer, wait at the foot of thesteps. [have noidea who Lam or how I got there. ‘Thereisno before orafter, it isa perfect moment in time or out of time. I am concerned about something, however. I wait below the lowest step. There, in the water beside me, isa shal- low basket or ark or box or boat. There is, of course, a baby nested in it. The Princess must find the baby. I know that she will find this child. I know that the baby will be protected and sheltered by her and that is all that matters. ‘We have all seen this picture. I pored over this picture as a child, before I could read, in our illustrated Doré Bible. But the black and white Doré illustration has nothing in common with this, except the subject. The name of this pictureis Moses in the Bulrushes and the Professor of course knows that. The Professorand I discuss this picture. He asks itis, thedream- er, whoam the baby in the reed basket? Idon’t think Iam. Do remember if the picture as I knew it as a child had any other figure? I can’t remember. The Professor thinks there is the child Miriam, half concealed in the rushes; do I remember? I half remember. Am I, perhaps, the child Miriam? Or am I, after all, in my fantasy, the baby? Do I wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion? 26 Axy amateur dabbler with the theories of psychoanalysis can reconstruct, even from thisso-far briefevidence, the motive or material or suppressed or repressed psychic urge that pro- 37°TRIBUTE TO FREUD Jected this dream-picture. There is the litle girl with her doll in her father’s study. She has come to her father’s study to be alone or to bealone with him. Her brother's interestsare more lively and exterior and her brother does not enter readily into her doll-family games. He should be the dolls’ father or the dolls’ doctor, who is called in occasionally. But this does not interest him. He has soldiers and marbles and likes to race about, outdoors and indoors. Here in our father’s study, we must be quiet. A girl-child, a doll, an aloof and silent father form this triangle, this family romance, this trinity which fol- lows the recognized religious pattern: Father, aloof, distant, the provider, the protector - buta little un-get-at-able, a little oo far away and giant-like in proportion, alittle chilly withal; Mother, a virgin, the Virgin, that is, an untouched child, ador- ing, with faith, building a dream, and the dream is sym- bolized by the third member of the trinity, the Child, the doll inher arms. 27 ‘Tue DOLL 1s the dream or the symbol of the dream of this par- ticular child, as these various Ra, Nut, Hathor, Isis, and Ka figures that are dimly apprehended on their shelves or on the Professor’s table in the other room are the dream or the sym- bol of the dream of other aspiring and adoring souls. The childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race, we havenoted, the Professor has written somewhere. The child in me has gone. The child has vanished and yet it is not dead. This contact with the Professor intensifies or projects this dream of a Princess, the river, the steps, the child. The river is an Egyptian river, the Nile; the Princess is an Egyptian lady. +38: WRITING ON THE WALL Egypt is present, as I say, actually or by inference or sugges- Tae in the old-fashioned print orengraving ofthe Temple at Karnak, hanging on the wall above me, as well asin the dimly outlined egg-shaped Raor Nutor Ka figures on the Professor's desk in the other room. A Queen or Princess is obvious mother-symbol; moreover, there had been casual references, from time to time, to the Professor's French translator, Madame Marie Bonaparte, ‘the Princess’ or ‘our Princess,’ as ¢ Professor calls her. ; 7 Perhaps here too, ason the occasion of the Professor's birth- day in the house at Dabling, [wanted something different or I wanted to give the Professor something different. Princess George of Greece had been consistently helpful and used her influence in the general interests of the Psycho-Analytical “Association. She was ‘our Princess’ in that, as Marie Bona- parte, she had translated the Professor's difficult German into French and wasready tostand by him now that the Nazi peril was already threatening Vienna. She was‘our Princess’ in the world, devoted and influential. But is it possible that Lsensed ‘another world, another Princess? Is it possible that I (leaping over every sort of intellectual impediment and obstacle) not wished only, but knew, the Professor would be born again? 28 For ritNas had happened in my life, pictures, ‘real dreams,’ actual psychic or occult experiences that were superficially, at least, outside the province of established psychoanalysis. But T am working with the old Professor himself; [want his opinion onaseries of events. Itis true, [had not discussed these experi- ‘ences openly, but I had sought help from one or two (to my +39+TRIBUTE TO FREUD mind) extremely wise and gifted people in the past and they hhad nothelped me. At least, they had notbeen able to lay,as it were, the ghost. If the Professor could not do this, I thought, nobody could. [could not get rid of the experience by writing about it. [had tried that. There was no use telling the story, into the air, as it were, repeatedly, like the Ancient Mariner who plucked at the garments of the wedding guest with that skinny hand. My own skinny hand would lay, as it were, the cardson the table~ hereand nowhere with the old Professor. He was more than the world thought him - that I well knew. If he could not ‘tell my fortune,’ nobody else could. He would not call it telling fortunes - heaven forbid! But we would lead ‘up to the occult phenomena, we would show him how it hap- pened. That, at least, we could doin part, at any rate. [could say, I did say that I had had a number of severe shocks; the newsof the death of my father, following the death in action of my brother in France, came to me when I was alone outside London in the early spring of that bad influenza winter of 1919. I myself was waiting for my second child Thad lost the firstin 1915, from shockand repercussions of war news broken tome in a rather brutal fashion. ‘The second child, for some reason, I knew, must be born, Ob, she would be born, all right, though it was an admitted scientific fact that a waiting mother, stricken with that pneu- monia, double pneumonia, would not live. She might live ~ yes ~ but then the child would not. They rarely both live, if ever! But there were reasons for us both living, so we did live. Atsome cost, however! The material and spiritual burden of Pulling usout of danger fell upon a young woman whom Thad only recently met -anyone who knows me knowswho this per- sonis. Her pseudonym is Bryherand we ll call her Bryher. If got well, she would herselfsce that the baby was protected and cherished and she would take me to a new world, a new life, to +40° WRITING ON THE WALL 1e land, spiritually of my predilection, geographically of my dren We wold goo Gree, could be arranged. eas arranged, though we two were the first unofficial visitors to ‘Athens after that war. This was spring 1920. This spring of 1920 held for me many unresolved terror, perils heartaches, dangers, physical as wel as spiritual or intellectual. IU had been a little maladjusted or even mildly deranged, it woule have been no small wonder. But of a series of strange experi- ences, te Professor picked out only one as being dangerous or hinting of danger ora dangerous tendency or symptom. Ido not yet quite see why he picked on the writing-on-the-wall as the danger-signal, and omitted what to my mind were ten- denciesorevents that were equally important or equally ‘dan- serous.’ However, as the Professor picked on the writing-on- the-wallas the most dangerousor the only actually dangerous ‘symptom,’ we will review it here. 29 i ‘aw projected on ‘Tue senues of shadow- or of light-pictures I saw project the wall of a hotel bedroom in the Tonian island of Corfu, i the end of April 1920, belong in the sense of quality an intensity, ofclarity and authenticity, to thesame psychic cate- gory as the dream of the Princess, the Pharaoh’s daughter, coming down the stairs. For myself I consider this sort of i i sion as a sort of halfway state ‘dream or projected picture or vision as a sort o between ordinary dream and the vison of those who, for lack ofa more definite term, we must call psychics or clairvoyants. Memories too, like the two I have recorded of my father in the \d my mother on Church Street, are in asense super- “AleTRIBUTE TO FREUD with so vivid a detail that they become almost events out of time, like the Princess dream and the writingon-the wall They are steps in the so-far superficially catalogued or built. up mechanism of supernormal, abnormal (or subnormal) states of mind, Steps? The Princess is coming down the steps from a house or palace or hal, far beyond our human habita- tion. The steps lead down to a river, the river of life presum. ably, that river named Nile in Egypt. She is ‘our Princess’ — that i, she is specifically the Professor's Princess and mine, ‘our’ personal guardian or inspiration. She is peculiarly ‘his’ Princess for this is a life-wish, apparently, that I have pro- jectedintoor untoan image ofthe Professor’sracial, ancestral background. We have talked of his age; his seventy-seven symbolized occult power and mystery to me. I frankly told him this without fear of being snubbed or thought ridiculous or superstitious. Iisimportantto me, that seventy-seven, and ave a seven or will acquire one a few months after his May birthday. Mine is, atthe time, a forty-seven, o there is thirty years difference in our ages. But ages? Around us are the old images or ‘dolls’ of pre-dynastic Egypt, and Moses was per- haps not yet born when that ite Ra or Nut or Ka figure on \e Professor's desk was first hamm¢ P Piahonthe banks ofthe Nie 4 DY 8 forgeries of 30 TaMt no pousr impressed, probably not alittle envious silted lady, our Prince av the Pools calle hes Tne doubt, unconsciously covet her worldly position, ‘her intellectual endowments, her power of translating the diffi- cult, scholarly, beautiful German of Sigmund Freud into no 142° WRITING ON THE WALL doubt equally distinguished and beautiful French. I cannot compete with her. Consciously, I do not feel any desire to do so, But unconsciously, I probably wish to be another equal factor or have equal power of benefiting and protecting the Professor. Iam also concerned, though I do not openly admit this, about the Professor's attitude toa future life. One day, I was deeply distressed when the Professor spoke to me about jis grandchildren - what would become of them? He asked me that, as ifthe future of hisimmediate family were the only future to be considered. There was, of course, the perfectly secured future of his own work, his books. But there was a more imminent, a more immediate future to consider. It wor- ried me to feel that he had no idea - it seemed impossible ~ really no idea that he would ‘wake up’ when he shed the frail locust-husk of his years, and find himself alive. 31 I pw xor say this to him, I did not really realize how deeply it concerned me. Itwasa fact, buta fact that I had not personally orconcretely resolved. Ihad accepted as part of my racial, my religious inheritance, the abstract idea of immortality, of the personal soul’s existence in some form or other, after it has shed the outworn oroutgrown body. The Chambered Nautilus of the New England poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, had been a great favorite of mine as a school girl; I did not think of the poem then, but its meters echo in my head now as I write this Till thow at length art free the last stanza ends, Leaving thine out- _grown shell by life's unresting sea! And Build thee more stately man- sions, O my soul isanother line, and with the Professor, I did feel that I had reached the high-water mark of achievement; 143+TRIBUTE TO FREUD T mean, I felt that to meet him at fort im at forty-seven, and to be aceepted by him as analysand or student, seemed tocrown all my other personal contacts and relationships, justify all the spirale ‘meanderings of my mind and body. I had come 1ome, in fact. And another poem comes inevi home, infact. And another poem comes inevitably to prompt On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome, Thisis, of course, Edgar Allan Poe's : . "oes much-quoted Hele my mother’s name was Helen. stom tii ea 32 ‘Tite PRoFEsson translated the pictures on the wal a Il, or the pic ing on the wall of a hotel bedroom in Corfu, the Greek Ionian island, that Isaw projected there in pear a 1920, asa desire for union with my mother. I was physically in Greece, in Hellas (Helen). Ihad come home to the glory that was Greece. Perhaps my trip to Greece, that spring, might have been interpreted asa flight from reality. Perhaps my experiences there might be translated asanother light. from aflight. There were wings anyway. I may say that never before and never since have [had an experience ofthis kind. Taw a dim shape formingon thewall between the foot ofthe bed and thewash-stand. Itwaslate afternoon; the wall was dull, mat ochre. I thought, at first, it was sunlight flickering from the shadows cast from or across the orange trees in full leat ancl +44 WRITING ON THE WALL fruit and flower outside the bedroom window. But I realized instantly that our side of the house was already in early shadow. The pictures on the wall were like colorless transfers or ‘calcomanias, as we pretentiously called them as children, ‘The first was head and shoulders, three-quarter face, no marked features, stencil or stamp of a soldier or airman, but the figure was dim light on shadow, not shadow on light. It ‘was a silhouette cut of light, not shadow, and so impersonal it mighthave been anyone, of almost any country. And yet there was a distinctly familiar line about the head with the visored cap; immediately it was somebody, unidentified indeed, yet suggesting a question - dead brother? lost friend? ‘Then there was the conventional outline of agoblet or cup, actually suggesting the mystic chalice, but it was the familiar goblet shape we all know, with round base and glass-stem, ‘This chalice is as large as the head of the soldier, or rather it simply takes up thesame amount of space, asif they were both formal patterns stamped on picture cards, or even (now that I think of it) on playing cards. I have said, with the Professor, that I would lay my cardson the table. These were those cards; so far, two of them. The third follows at once or Inow perceive it. It isa simple design in perspective, at least suggesting per- spective after the other two flat patterns. It is a circle or two circles, the base the larger of the two; it isjoined by three lines, not flat as I say but in perspective, a simple object to draw, once the idea of tilting the planes to give the idea of space is understood. And this object is so simple yet so homely that I think again, ‘It’s a shadow thrown.’ Actually, it could not have been, as this shadow was, ‘light’; but the exact replica of this pattern was set on the upper shelf of the old-fashioned wash-stand, along with toothbrush-mug, soap-dish, and those various oddments. It was exactly the stand for the small spirit- lamp we had with us. (Spirit-lamp?) And I know that, if these moeTRIBUTE TO FREUD objects are projected outward from my own brain, this is a neat trick, shortcut, pun, asort ofjoke. For the three-legged lamp-stand in the miscellaneous clutter on the wash-stand is none other than ourold friend, the tripod ofclassie Delphi. So the tripod, this venerated object of the cult of the sun god, symbol of poetry and prophecy, i linked by association with this most ordinary little metal frame that fits into the small saucepan and isused as a support for it when we boil water for that extra sustaining cup of tea upstairs in our room. The t pod then is linked in thought with something friendly and ordinary, the third or second member of my traveler's set, used as base forthe lat piritlamp and support forthe alumi. num container. The tripod now becomes all the more an ‘object to be venerated. At any rate, there itis, the third of my cardson the table 33 Sora, so Goon ~orso far, so dangerous, soabnormal a ‘sym com. The writing at leat sconssent It iscomposed by the same person, it is drawn or written by the same hand. Whether that hand or person is myself, projecting the images asa sign, a warning or a guiding sign-post from my own sub- concious mind, or whether they are projected from outside ~ they are at least clear enough, abstract and yet at the same time related to images of our ordinary time and space. But here I pause or the hand pauses ~ itis as if there were a slight question as to the conclusion or direction of the symbols. I mean, it wasasifa painter had stepped back from a canvas the better to regard the composition of the picture, or a musician “46° WRITING ON THE WALL had paused at the music-stand, perhaps for a moment, in doubt as to whether he would continue his theme, or wonder- ing pethaps in a more practical manner if he could himself turn the page on the stand before him without interrupting the flow of the music. That isin myselftoo-a wonder asto the seemliness,or the safety even, of continuing this experience or this experiment. For my head, although it cannot have taken very long in clock-time for these pictures to form there, is already warning me that this is an unusual dimension, an unusual way to think, that my brain or mind may not be equal to the occasion. Perhaps in that sense the Professor was right (actually, he was always right, though we sometimes trans- lated our thoughts into different languages or mediums). But there I am seated on the old-fashioned Victorian sofa in the Greek island hotel bedroom, and here I am reclining on the couch in the Professor's room, telling him this, and here again am I, ten years later, seated-at my desk in my own room in London. But there isnoclock-time, though we are fastidiously concerned with time and with a formal handling of a subject which has no racial and no time-barriers. Here is this oglyph of the unconscious or subconscious of the Professor's discovery and life-study, the hieroglyph actually in operation before our very eyes. But it is no easy matter to sustain this ‘mood, this ‘symptom’ or thisinspiration. ‘And there I sat and there is my friend Bryher who has brought me to Greece. I can turn now to her, though I do not budge an inch or break the sustained crystal-gazing stare at the wall before me. I say to Bryher, “There have been pictures here ~I thought they were shadows at first, but they are light, not shadow. They are quite simple objects ~ but of course it’s very strange. Ican break away from them now, if I want - it’s just a matter of concentrating - what do you think? Shall I stop? Shall I go on?” Bryher says without hesitation, ‘Go on.” 47TRIBUTE TO FREUD 34 Waite 1 was speaking to Bryher, there is a sort of pictorial buzzing -Imean, about the base of the tripod, there are small creatures, but these are in black; they move about, in and around the base of the tripod, but they are very small; they are like ants swarming, or very small half-winged insects that have not yet learnt to fly. Fly? They are fies, it seems - but no, they are tiny people, all in black or outlined as in, or with, shadow, in distinction to the figures of the three ‘cards’ already described. They are not a symbol of themselves, they are simply a sort of dust, a cloud or a swarm of small midges that move back and forth, but onone level, asif walking rather than flying. Even as I consider thisnew aspect of the writing, I am bothered, annoyed — just as one is when suddenly in'a country lane one is beset in the evening light by a sudden swarm of midges. They are not important but it would be a calamity if one of them got stuck in one’s eye. There was that sort of feeling; people, people - did they annoy me so? Would they perhaps eventually cloud my vision or, worse still, would onc of them get ‘stuckin my eye’? They were people, they were annoying ~ I did not hate people, I did not especially resent any one person. I had known such extraordinarily gifted and charming people. They had made much of me or they had slighted me and yet neither praise nor neglect mattered in the face of the gravest issues ~ life, death. (Ihad had my child, I wasalive.) And yet, so oddly, I knew that this experience, this writing-on-the-wall before me, could not be shared with them ~could not be shared with anyoneexcept the girl who stood so bravely there beside me. Thisgirl had said withouthesitation, ‘Go on.’ It was she really who had the detachment and the integrity of the Pythoness of Delphi. Butit was, battered and disassociated from my American family and my English “48+ WRITING ON THE WALL friends, who was seeing the pictures, who was reading the writing or who was granted the inner vision. Or perhaps in some sense, we were ‘seeing’ it together, for without her, admittedly, I could not have gone on. 35 Yer, ALTHOUGH now assured of her support, my own head is splitting with the ache of concentration. [know that if [let go, lessen the intensity of my stare and shut my eyes or even blink my eyes, to rest them, the pictures will fade out. My curiosity is insatiable. This has never happened to me before, it may never happen again. I am not actually analyzing this as I watch the pictures, but it seems now possible that the mecha- nism of their projection (from within or from without) had something to do with, or in some way was related to, my feel- ings for the shrine at Delphi. Actually, we had intended stop- ping off at Itea; we had come from Athens, by boat through the Corinthian canal and up the Gulfof Corinth. Delphi and the shrine of Helios (Hellas, Helen) had been really the main objective of my journey. Athens came a very close second in affection; however, having left Athens, we were informed when the boat stopped at Itea that it was absolutely impos- sible for two ladies alone, at that time, to make the then dan- gerous trip on the winding road to Delphi, that in imagination I saw so clearly tucked away under Parnassus. Bryher and I were forced to content ourselves with a some- ‘what longer stay than was first planned in the beautiful island of Corfu. But the idea of Delphi had always touched me very deeply and Bryher and I, back in that winter London of the previous spring it wasa winter London that spring ~ had talked of the 149+OC EEO TRIBUTE TO FREUD famous sacred way. She herself had visited these places with her father before the 1914warand I had once aid to her, while convalescing from the 1919 illness, ‘If I could only feel that I could walk the sacred way to Delphi, Iknow I would get well.’ But no, now that we were so near, we could not go to Delphi. We were going in another direction, Brindisi, Rome, Paris, London. Already our half-packed bags, typewriter, books lay strewn about; we obviously were leaving. And we were not Jeaving Corfu in orderto return to Athens, as we had talked of doing when we first landed at Corfu, with the thoughtofa pos- sible arrangement, after all, with a party from one of the archaeological schoolsat Athens, from Athens itself, overland to Delphi. Travel was difficult, the country itself in a state of political upheaval; chance hotel acquaintances expressed surprise that two women alone had been allowed to come at all at that time. We were always ‘two women alone’ or ‘two ladies alone,’ but we were not alone. 36 ‘Tuexe HAD neEN writing-on-walls before, in Biblical, in clas- sic literature, At least, all through time, there had been a tra- dition of warnings or messages from another world or another state of being. Delphi, specifically, was the shrine of the Prophet and Musician, the inspiration of artists and the patron of physicians. Was not the ‘blameless physician,’ Ask- lepios himself, reputed to be Phoebus Apollo's own son? Reli- gion, art, and medicine, through the latter ages, became separated; they grow further apart from day to day. These three working together, to form anew vehicle of expression or new form of thinking or of living, might be symbolized by +50: WRITING ON THE WALL the tripod, the third of the images on the wall before me, the third of the ‘cards’ threw down, asit were on the table, for the benefit of the old Professor. The tripod, we know, was the sym- bol of prophecy, prophetic utterance or occult or hidden knowledge; the Priestess or Pythoness of Delphi sat on the tri- pod while she pronounced her verse couplets, the famous Del- phic utterances which it was aid could be read two ways, Wecan read my writing, the fact that there was writing, in ‘two waysorin more than two ways. Wecan read or translate it as a suppressed desire for forbidden ‘signs and wonders,’ breaking bounds, a suppressed desire to be a Prophetess, to be important anyway, megalomania they call it ~ a hidden desire to ‘found a new religion’ which the Professor ferreted out in the later Moses picture. Or this writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the artist’s mind, a picture or an illus- trated poem, taken out of the actual dream or daydream con- tent and projected from within (though apparently from outside), really a high-powered idea, simply over-stressed, over- thought, you might say, an echo of an idea, a reflection of a reflection, a ‘freak’ thought that had got out of hand, gone too far,a ‘dangeroussymptom.” 37 Bur symptom or inspiration, the writing continues to write itselfor be written. Itisadmittedly picture-writing, though its symbols can be translated into terms of today; it is Greek in spirit, rather than Egyptian. The original or basic image, however, is common to the whole race and applicable to almost any time. ase‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD 38 Soran THE pictures, the transfers or “calcomanias,’ have run level on the wall space between the foot of the bed and the wash-stand. Now they take an upward courseor seem about to do so. The ‘buzzing’ seems to have ceased or the black flies have flown away or the shadow-people faded out. The first three pictures or ‘cards on the table’ were static, they were there complete; or dimly there, they became less dim as the outline and the meaning became recognizable. But this pic- ture or symbol begins to draw itself before my eyes. The moving fingerwrites. Two dotsof light are placed orappear on the space above the rail of the wash-stand, and a line forms, but so very slowly ~ as if the two rather heavy dots elongated from their own centers, asif they faded in intensity as two lines emerged, slowly moving toward one another. They will meet, it is evi- dent, and from the pattern (two dots on a blackboard) we will get a single line. I do not know how long it took for these two fraillinesto meetand then toremain one, intensified orin ital- ics, underlined as it were. One line? It may have taken a split fraction ofa second to form, butnow Iam perfectly well aware that this concentration isa difficult matter. My facial muscles seem stiff with the effort and I may become frozen like one of those enemies of Athené, the goddessof wisdom, to whom Per- seus showed the Gorgon head. Am I looking at the Gorgon head, a suspect, an enemy to be dealt with? Or am I myself Perseus, the hero who is fighting for Truth and Wisdom? But Perseus could find his way about with winged sandals and the cloak of invisibility. Moreover, he himself could wield the ugly weapon of the Gorgon’s severed head, because Athené (orwas it Hermes, Mercury?) had told him what todo. He was himself to manipulate his weapon, this ugly severed head of +52: WRITING ON THE WALL the enemy of Wisdom and Beauty, by looking at it in the pol- ished metal of hisshield. Even he, the half-god or hero, would bbe turned to stone, frozen ifhe regarded too closely and with- out the shield to protect him, in its new quality of looking- glass or reflector, the ugly Head or Source of evil. SoI, though I did not make this parallel at the time, still wondered. But ‘even as I wondered, I kept the steady concentrated gaze at the wall before me. 39 ‘Tyree 15 ONE LINE clearly drawn, but before I have actually recovered from this, or have had time to take breath, as it were, another two dots appear and I know that another line will form in the same way. Soit does, each lineisa little shorter than its predecessor, so at last, there it is, this series of fore- shortened lines that make a ladder or give the impression of a ladder set up there on the wall above the wash-stand. It is a ladder of light, but even now I may not take time, as I say, to draw breath. Imay be breathing naturally but Ihave the feel- ing of holding my breath under water. As if [were searching under water for some priceless treasure, and if [bobbed up to the surface the clue to its whereabouts would be lost forever. Sol, though seated upright, am in a sense diving, head-down under water-inanother element, andas I seem now sonear to getting the answer or finding the treasure, I feel that my whole life, my whole being, will be blighted forever if I miss this chance. I must not lose grip, Imust not lose the end of the pie- tureand somiss the meaning of the whole, sofar painfully per- ceived. I must hold on here or the picture will blur over and the sequence be lost. In a sense, it seems I am drowning; 53+‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD already half-drowned to the ordinary dimensions of space and time, I know that I must drown, as it were, completely in order to come out on the other side of things (like Alice with her looking-glass or Perseus with his mirror). I must drown completely and come out on the other side, or rise to the sur- face after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values, my treasure dredged from the depth. [must be born again or break utterly. 40 ‘Tues Lines seeM to take such a long time to form separately. Perhaps they aresymbolic agesor aeons. Anyhow, Thave been able to concentrate, to hold the picture so far. There are maybe seven rungs to this ladder, maybe five; I did not count, them. They are symbolic anyway, the ladder itselfisa symbol well authenticated it is Jacob’s ladder if you will; itisa sym- bol common toall religious myth or lore. But fortunately the last figure to form does so, quickly; at least, there seems less strain and worry of waiting now. There she’s, Icall her she; I call her Niké, Victory. She is facing the wall or moving asagainst the wall up from the last rung of the ladder and she moves or floats swiftly enough. To my right, to her right on the space between the ladder and the mirror- frame above the wash-stand, there isa series of broken curves. ‘Actually, they are above the ladder, not touching the angel who brushes past them. I realize that this decorative detail is ina sense suggested by the scrollwork of the mirror-frame, but asin the casc of the tripod (also suggested by, or reminding me ofa natural homely object on thestand there), cannot not bea replica ofit, ashadow ofit, foragain the scrollwork isdrawn in bas WRITING ON THE WALL light and would not anyway match a shadow direction even if shadow could be thrown. The Sor half-5 faces the angel; that is, the series of the S-pattern opens out in the direction of the angel; they are like question marks without the dot beneath them. I did not know what this scrollwork indicated; thought at the time that it was a mere wave-like decorative detail. But now I think this inverted S-pattern may have rep- resented a series of question marks, the questions that have been asked through the ages, that the ages will go on asking. 41 Victory, n1xé, as I called her exactly then and there, goes on, Sheisa common-or-garden angel, like any angel you may find ‘onan Easter or Christmas card. Her back is toward me, she is simply outlined but very clearly outlined like the first three symbolsor‘cards.’ But unlike them, she isnot flat or static, she isin space, in unwalled space, not flat against the wall, though she moves upward as against its surface. She is a moving-pic- tureand fortunately she movesswiftly. Notswiftly exactly but ‘with asure floating that at least gives my mind some rest, as if my mind had now escaped the bars of that ladder, no longer climbing or caged but free and with wings. On she goes. Above her head, to her left in the space left vacant on this black-board (or light-board) or screen, a series of tent-like tri- angles forms. I say tent-like triangles, for though they are simple triangles they suggest tents tome. I feel that the Nik is about tomove intoand through the tents, and thisshe exactly does, So far ~so good. But thisisenough. Idrop my head in my hands; it is aching with this effort of concentration, but I feel that I have seen the picture. I thought, ‘Niké, Victory,’ and “55:TRIBUTE TO FREUD even asl thought it, it seemed to me that this Victory was not now, it was another Victory; in which case there would be another war. When that war had completed itself, rung by rung or year by year, I, personally (I felt), would be free, I myself would go on in another, a winged dimension, For the tents, it seemed to me, were not so much the symbolic tents of the past battlefields, the near past or the far past, but tents or shelters o beset up in another future contest. The picture now seemed to be something to do with another war, but even at that there would be Victory. Niké, Victory seemed to be the clue, seemed to be my own especial sign or part of my hier- oglyph. We had visited in Athens, only a short time ago, the tiny Temple of Victory that stands on the rock of the Acrop- lis, to your right as you turn off from the Propylaea. I must holdon tothis one word. I thought, ‘Niké, Victory.’ I thought, ‘Helios, thesun....’ And [shut off, cut out’ before the final pi ture, before (you might say) the explosion took place. But though I admit to myself that now I have had enough, maybe just alittle too much, Bryher, who has been waiting by me, carries on the ‘reading’ where I left off. Afterwards she told me that she had seen nothing on the wall there, until I dropped my head in my hands. She had been there with me patient, wondering, no doubt deeply concerned and not a little anxious as to the outcome of my state or mood. But as I relaxed, let go, from complete physical and mental exhaus- tion, she saw what I did not see. It was the last section of the series, or the last concluding symbol - perhaps that ‘deter- minative’ that is used in the actual hieroglyph, the picture that contains the whole series of pictures in itself or helps clar- ifyorexplain them. Inany case, itisapparently aclearenough picture or symbol. She said it wasa circle like the sun-disk and a figure within the disk; a man, she thought, was reaching out to draw the image of a woman (my Niké) into the sun beside him, +56" WRITING ON THE WALL 42 ‘Tue YEARS BETWEEN seemed a period of waiting, of marking time. There was a growing feeling of stagnation, of lethargy, clearly evident among many of my own contemporaries, ‘Those who were aware of the trend of political events, on the other hand, were almost too clever, too politically minded, too high-powered intellectually for me altogether. What I seemed to sense and wait for was frowned upon by the first group, though I learned very early not toair my thoughtsand fears; they were morbid, they were too self-centered and introspective altogether. Why -my brother-in-law spent such a happy holiday in the Black Forest (with ~ so-and-so ~chap- terand verse) and the food wasso good - everybody wassohos- pitable and so very charming. If, on the other hand, I ventured a feeble opinion to the second group, I was given not chapter and verse so much as the whole outpouring of pre~ digested voluminous theories. My brain staggers now when I remember the deluge of brilliant talk I was inflicted with; what would happen if, and who would come to power when - butwith all theirabstract clear-sightedness, thissecond group seemed as muddled, as lethargic in their own way, as the first. ‘At least, their theories and their accumulated data seemed unrooted, raw. But this, admit — yes, I know - was partly due to my own hopeless feeling in the face of brilliant statisticians and one-track-minded theories. Where is this taking you, 1 wanted to shout at both parties. One refused to admit the fact that the flood was coming - the other counted the nails and measured the planks with endless exact mathematical formulas, but didn’t seem to have the very least idea of how to put the Ark together. “57+WRITING ON THE WALL 43 ALREADY IN VIENNA, the shadows were lengthening or the tide ‘was rising. The signs of grim coming events, however, mani- fested in a curious fashion. There were, for instance, occa- sional coquettish, confetti-like showers from the air, gilded paper swastikas and narrow strips of printed paper like the ones we pulled out of our Christmas bon-bons, those gay favors that we called ‘caps’ as children in America and that English children call ‘crackers.’ The party had begun, or this ‘was preliminary to the birthday or the wedding. I stooped to scrape up a handful of these confetti-like tokens as I was leav- ing the Hotel Regina one morning. They were printed on those familiar little oblongs of thin paper that fell out of the paper cap when it was unfolded at the party; we called them mottoes. These mottoes were short and bright and to the point, One read in clear primer-book German, ‘Hitler gives bread,’ ‘Hitler gives work,’ and so on. I wondered if I should enclose this handful in a letter to one of my first group of friends in London ~ or to one of the second. I had a mischie- vous picture of this gay shower falling on a carpet in Kensing- ton or Knightsbridge or on a bare floor in a Chelsea or Bloomsbury studio. It would be a good joke. The paper was crisp and clean, the gold clear as Danaé’s legendary shower, and the whole savored of birthday cake and candles or fresh- bought Christmas-tree decorations. The gold, however, would not stay bright nor the paper crisp very long, for people passed to and fro across Freiheitsplatz and along the pave- ment, trampling over this Danaé shower, not taking any notice. Was I the only person in Vienna who had stooped to scrape up a handful of these tokens? It seemed so. One of the hotel porters emerged with a long-handled brush-broom. AsT “58+ ‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD saw him begin methodically sweeping the papers ff the pave- ment, I dropped my handfulin the gutter. 44 ‘Tutene were orien swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down Berggasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led to the Professor's door - maybe, they passed on down another street toanother door but I did not lookany further. Noone brushed these swastikas out. It is not so easy toscrub death-head chalk- marks from a pavement. It is not so easy and it is more con- spicuous than sweeping tinsel paper into a gutter. And this wasallittlelater, 45 ‘Twen rHere were rifles. They were stacked neatly. They stood in bivouac formationsat thestreet comers. It must have been a weekend; I don’t remember. I could verify the actual date of their appearance by referring to my notebooks, but itis the general impression that concerns us, rather than the his- torical or political sequence. They were not German guns ~ but perhaps they were; anyway, these were Austrian soldiers. ‘The stacks of rifles gave the streets a neat, finished effect, as of an 1860 print. They scemed old-fashioned, the soldiers seemed old-fashioned; I was no doubt reminded of familiar pictures of our American Civil War. This was some sort of civil war. Noone would explain it tome, The hall porter, usu- ally so talkative, was embarrassed when I questioned him. Well, I must not involve him in any discussion or dangerous 159"TRIBUTE TO FREUD statement of opinion. I went out anyway. There were some people about and the soldiers were out of a picture ora film of reconstructed Civil War period. They did not seem very for- midable, Thad meant to go tothe opera - it was late afternoon or early evening - so I might as well go to the opera, if there were an opera, as mope in my room or loiter about the hotel, wondering and watching. When challenged on one of the main thoroughfares, I said simply, in my sketchy German, that I wasa visitor in Vienna; they called me the English lady at the hotel, so I said I was from England, which in fact I was. What was I doing? Where was going? I said I was going to the opera, if I was not disturbing them or getting in their way. ‘There was a little whispering and shuffling and I was embar- rassed to find that [had attracted the attention of the officers and had almost a guard of honor to the steps of the opera house, where there were more guns and soldiers, seated on the steps and standing at attention on the pavement. It seemed that nothing, at any rate, could stop the opera. I stayed for part of the performance of ~ I don’t remember what it was ~ and had no trouble finding my way back. 46 ‘Tuten rt was quter and the hotel lobby seemed strangely empty. Even the hall porter disappeared from behind his desk. Maybe this was the following Monday; in any case, Iwas due at Berggasse for my usual session. The little maid, Paula, peered through a crack in the door, hesitated, then furtively ushered me in. She did not wear her pretty cap and apron. Evidently, she was not expecting me. ‘But ~ but no one has come today; no one has gone out.’ Allright, wouldsheexplain to the Professor, in case he did not want tosee me. She opened the waiting-room door. I waited as usual in the room, with the “60° WRITING ON THE WALL round table, the odds and ends of old papers and magazines. ‘There were the usual framed photographs; among them, Dr. Havelock Ellis and Dr. Hanns Sachs greeted me from the wall. There was the honorary diploma that had been presented to the Professor in his early days by the small New England university. There was also a bizarre print or engrav- ing of some nightmare horror, a ‘Buried Alive’ or some such thing, done in Diireresque symbolic detail. There were long lace curtains at the window, like a ‘room in Vienna’ ina play orfilm, ‘The Professor opened the inner door after a short interval. ‘Then Isat on the couch. The Professor said, ‘But why did you come? Noone hascome here today, noone. Whatisitlikeout- side? Why did you come out?” I said, ‘It’s very quiet. There doesn’t seem to be anyone about in the streets. The hotel seems quiet, too. But otherwise, it’s much the same as usual.’ He said, ‘Why did you come?’ It seemed to puzzle him, he did not seem to understand what had brought me. 47 Waar pip HE expect me to say? I don’t think I said it. My being there surely expressed it? J am here because no one else has come, Asifagain, symbolically, I must be different. Where was the Flying Dutchman? Or the American lady-doctor whom I had not seen? There were only four of usat that time, Ibelieve, rather special people. It is true that Mrs. Burlingham, Miss Anna Freud’s devoted friend, and the Professor's disciple or pupil, had an apartment, further up the stairs. [had gone up there to tea one day before my session here. The Professor was not really alone. The envoys of the Princess, too, had been informed, were waiting on the door-steps of various legations +61:TRIBUTE TO FREUD and they would inform her of any actual threat to the Profes- sor's personal safety. But, in a sense, I was the only one who had come from the outside; little Paula substantiated that when she peered so fearfully through the crack in the front door. Again, I was different. I had made a unique gesture, although actually I felt my coming was the merest courtesy; this was our usual time of meeting, our session, our ‘hour’ together. I did not know what the Professor was thinking. He could not be thinking, ‘Iam anold man ~ youdo not think it worth Jour whileto love me, Orif he remembered having said that, this surely was the answer toit. 48 IrMay nave aren that day or another that the Professor spoke ofhis grandchildren. In any case, whenever it was, [felt a sud- den gap, a severance, a chasm or a schism in consciousness, which [ tried to conceal from him. It was so tribal, so conven- tionally Mosaic. As he ran over their names and the names of their parents, one felt the old impatience, a sort of intellectual eyestrain, the old boredom of looking out historical, gene- alogical references in a small-print school or Sunday-school Bible. It was Genesis but not the very beginning. Not the exciting verses about the birds and the reptiles, the trees, the sun and the moon, those greater and lesser lights. He was wor- ried about them (and no small wonder), but I was worried about something else. I did not then realize the reason for my anxiety. knew the Professor would move on somewhere else, before so very long, but it seemed the eternal life he visualized was in the old Judaic tradition. He would live forever like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in his children’s children, multi- plied like the sands of the sea. That is how it seemed to me his +62+ WRITING ON THE WALL mind was working, and that is how, faced with the blank wall of danger, of physical annihilation, his mind would work. At least, there was that question between us, ‘What will become of my grandchildren?” He was looking ahead but his concern for immortality was translated into terms of grand- children, He would live in them; he would live in his books, of course; I may have murmured something vaguely tothe effect that future generations would continue to be grateful to his written word; that, I may have mentioned - I am sure I did sometime or other, on that or another occasion, But though a sincere tribute, those words were, or would be, in a sense, superficial, They would fall lat, somehow. It wasso very obvi- ‘ous that his work would live beyond him. To express this ade- quately would be to delve too deep, to become involved in technicalities, and at the same time it would be translating my admiration for what he stood for, what actually he was, into terms a little too formal, too prim and precise, too con- ventional, too banal, too polite. 1 did not want to murmur conventional words; plenty of, people had done that. IfT could not say exactly what I wanted tosay, I would not say anything, just ason hisseventy-seventh, birthday, if could not find what I wanted to give, I would not give anything, I did find what I wanted, that cluster of garde- nias, somewhat later; that offering was in the autumn of 1938. And these words, the words that I could not speak then, too, come somewhat later, in the autumn of 1944. The flowersand the words bear this in common, they are what I want, what I waited to find for the Professor, ‘to greet the return of the Gods.” It is true, ‘other people read: Goods.’ A great many people had read ‘goods’ and would continue to do so. But the Professor knew, he must have known, that, by implication, he himself wasincluded in the number of those Gods. He himself already counted as immortal. +63+TRIBUTE TO FREUD 49 I pip nor know exactly who he was and yet it seems very obvi. ous now. Long ago, in America, I had a peculiar dream or merely flash of vision. Twasnot given to these things, though asasmall child, in common with many other small children, I had had one or two visionary or supernormal experiences. ‘This time I must have been eighteen or nineteen. The picture or segment of picture impressed me so much that I tried to identify it. Ibwas nota very sensational experience. The vision or picture was simply this: before sleeping or just on waken- ing, there was a solid shape before my eyes, no luminous cloud-pictures or vague fantasy, but an altar-shaped block of stone; this was divided into two sections by the rough stone marking; it was hardly a carved line but it was definitely a division of the surface of the rough stone into two halves. In one halforsection, there was aserpent, roughly carved; he was conventionally coiled with head erect; on the other side, there was @ roughly incised, naturalistic yet conventionally drawn thistle. Why this? It is odd to think, at this very late date, that it was Ezra Pound who helped me interpret this picture, Ezra was a year older; I had known him since I was fifteen. I do not think I spoke of this to anyone but Ezra and a girl, Frances Josepha, with whom later I took my first trip to Europe. Ezra at that time was staying with his parents in a house outside Phila- delphia, for the summer months. It was there, one afternoon, that Ezra said, ‘Ihave an idea about your snake on a brick,’ as he callled it. We went into the study or library ~ it was a fur- nished house, taken over from friends ~ and Ezra began jerk- ing out various reference books and concordances. He seemed +64 WRITING ON THE WALL ied in the end that this was a flashback in time or a pre- vision of some future event that had to do with Aesculapius or Asklepios, the human or half-human, half-divine child of Phoebus Apollo, who was slain by the thunder-bolt or light- ning-shaft of Zeus, but later placed among the stars. The ser- pentiscertainly thesign ortotem, through the ages, of healing and of that final healing when we slough off, for the last time, ourencumbering flesh orskin. The serpent issymbol of death, as we know, but also of resurrection. ‘There was no picture of this. Ezra said airily, ‘The thistle just goes with it.’ I do not think he actually identified the thistle in connection with the serpent, butin any cascit was he who first gave me the idea of Asklepios, the ‘blameless physi- cian,’ in that connection. I found this design later but only once and in only one place. I was with Frances Josepha and her mother on our first trip ‘abroad.’ This was the summer of 1911. We went from New York to Havre, then by boat up the Seine to Paris. ‘Here itis, Isaid on one of our first visits to the galleries of the Louvre, ‘quick,’ as if it might vanish like the original ‘brick.’ It was a small signet-ring in a case of Graeco- Roman or Hellenistic seals and signets. Under the glass, set in a row with other seal-rings, was little grey-agate oval. It was a small ring with rather fragile setting, as far as one could judge, but the design was unmistakable. On the right side, as in the original, was the coiled, upright serpent; on the left, an exquisitely chased stalk, with the spiny double leaf and the flower-head, our thistle. I have never found this design any- where else; there areserpentsenough and heraldic thistles but Thave not found the two in combination, though Ihave leafed over reference books from time to time, at odd moments, or glanced over classic coin designs or talismans just ‘in case.’ I never found my serpent and thistle in any illustrated volume of Greekor Ptolemaic design orin any odd corner onanactual +65°‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD Greek pottery jar o Etruscan vase, but through the years as I stopped off in Paris, on eross-continental journeys, I went back to assure myself that Thad not, at any rate, ‘dreamt’ the signet-ring, There it was; it was always in the same place, under the glass, in the frame, with the small slip of faded paper witha leer oragroupoflettersanda number, Oncel even went to the length of purchasing the special . that deal with his section, hoping forsome‘etal, bur tore ‘was the briefest mention of ‘my’ little ring; Tread, ‘intaglio or signet-ring of Graeco-Roman or Hellenistic design,’ and a suitable approximate date. That was all. . 50 Stoner ~as from sign, a mark, token, proof; signet ~ the privy seal, a seal; signet-ring — a ring with a signet or private seal; sign-manual - the royal signature, usually only the initials of the sovereign’s name. (I have used my initials H.D. con- sistently as my writing signet or sign-manual, though it is only, at this very moment, as checkup on the word ‘signet’ in my Chambers’ English Dictionary that [realize that my writ- ingsignature has anything remotely suggesting sovereignty or the royal manner.) Sign again - a word, gesture, symbol, or mark, intended to signify something else. Sign again -(medi- cal) a symptom, (astronomical) one of the twelve parts of the Zodiac, Again sign -toattach asignature to, and sign-post -a direction post; all from the French, signe, and Latin, signum And as I write that last word, there flashes into my mind the associated in hoc signum or rather, it must be in hoc signo and +66 WRITING ON THE WALL 51 ‘Tiere was a HANDFULOfold ringsina corner of one of the Pro- fessor’s cases and I thought of my signet-ring at the galleries of the Louvre in Patis, but I did not speak of it to the Professor then or later, and though I felt curious about the rings at the time, I did not suggest his opening the door of the case and showing them to me. He had taken up one of the figures on his desk. He was holding it in hishand and looking at me. This, 1 surmised, was the image that he thought would interest me most. There was an ivory Indian figure in the center; the objects were arranged symmetrically and I wondered if the seated Vishnu (I think it was) belonged there in the center by right of precedence or preference or because of its shape. ‘Though I realized the beautiful quality and design of the ivory, I was seeing it rather abstractly; the subject itself did not especially appeal to me, Serpent-heads rose like flower petals to form a dome or tent over the head of the seated image; possibly it was seated on a flower or leaf; the effect of the whole was of a half-flower, cut lengthwise, the figure tak- ing the place or producing the effect of a stamen-cluster or oval seed-pod, in the center. Only when you came close, you saw the little image and the symmetrical dome-like back- ‘ground of the snakes’ heads. It is true, these snake-heads sug- gested, each, a half-S, which might have recalled the scroll pattern of the inverted S or incomplete question mark in the picture series on the wall ofthe bedroom in the Greek island of Corfu of that spring of 1920. But I did not make this com- parison then or afterwards to the Professor, and I felt a little uneasy before the extreme beauty of this carved Indian ivory which compelled me, yet repelled me, at the same time. I did not always know if the Professor's excursions with me +67"TRIBUTE TO FREUD into the other room were by way of distraction, actual social occasions, or part of his plan. Did he want to find out how I would react tocertain ideasembodied in these littlestatues, or how deeply I felt the dynamic idea still implicit in spite of the fact that ages or aeons of time had flown over many of them? (Or did he mean simply to imply that he wanted to share his {treasures with me, those tangible shapesbefore us that yet sug- gested the intangible and vastly more fascinating treasures of his own mind? Whatever his idea, I wanted then, as at other times, tomeet him halfway; [wanted toreturn, in as unobtru- sive a way as possible, the courtesy that was so subtly offered me. If it was a game, a sort of roundabout way of finding out something that perhaps my unconscious guard or censor was anxious to keep from him, well, would domy best to play this game, this guessing game ~ or whatever it was. So, asthe ivory had held my attention and perhaps (I did not know) it was especially valued by him, as it held the center place on his imposing desk (that seemed placed there, now Icome to think ofit, almost likea high altar, in the Holy of Holies), Isaid, real- izing my slight aversion to this exquisite work of art, “That ivory - what is it? It’s Indian obviously. It’s very beautiful,” He said, barely glancing at the lovely object, ‘It was sent to me by a group of my Indian students.’ He added, ‘On the whole, I think my Indian students have reacted in the least satisfactory way to my teaching.’ So much for India, so much for his Indian students. This was not his favorite, this Orient- al, passionate, yet cold abstraction, He had chosen something clse. It was a smallish object, judging by the place left empty, my end of the semicircle, made by the symmetrical arrange. ment of the Gods (or the Goods) n his table. ‘This is my favor- ite,’ he said. He held the object toward me. I took it in my hand. It was a little bronze statue, helmeted, clothed to the foot in carved robe with the upper incised chiton or peplum, “68+ WRITING ON THE WALL One hand wasextendedasitholding astafforrod,‘Sheis per- fect, he said ‘nly sh has lot he spe. "1 de not say anything: He knew that loved Greece, He knew that Loved Hellas. 1 stood looking at Pallas Athen she whose winged atribute was Nike, Victory, orshe stood wingless,NikéA-pterosin the old day, in the litle temple to your right as you climb the steps tothe Propylaeaon the Acropolisat Athens, He too had climbed thos steps once, he had told me, for the briefest sur veyaf the glory that was Greece, NikéA-pteros,shewas calle a the Wingless Victory, for Victory could never, woul away from Athens. 52 have been talking Greek 1 as Lost HER speaR, He might ‘ “ ‘The bonuaiful oncofhis voice had away oftaking an English phratrsentenoutoftconen (out heaaraed on so that, altho xt, you might say, ofthe whole language) otha, althovg hhewas speaking English without perceptible wacef accent Yethe wasspeakng a foreign language. The tone of his vce, thesinging quality that sosubtly permeated the texture of spoken word, made that spoken word lve in another dimen- ‘or take on another coloras if he had dipped the. eyed ofconventi wught and with it, conventio of conventionally woven thoug enionally i sown brewing orheldastrip Sspokenthought,intoa vat ofhiso Sr eee noegkt, ripped from the monotonous faded and out texture of the language itself, into the bubbling cau ron of his own mind in order to draw it forth dyed Blue or scares ane aor the ld grey meh scrap of though wen acastoffrag, that would become hereafte ns Standard, a sign again, to indicate a direction or, fluttering alofton a pole, tolead an army. +69"TRIBUTE TO FREUD Andon theother hand, when he said, she ispefét, hem not only thatthe ltde bronze statue was a pect symbol, ‘made in man’s image (in woman's, asit happened), tobe ven. erated asa projection ofabstract thought, Pallas Athené, born without human or even without divine mother, sprung full- armed from the head ofher father, our-father, Zeus, Theus, ot God; he meant as well, this little piece of metal you hold in your hand (look at it) is priceless really, itis perf, a prize, a find of the best period of Greek art, the classie period in its ‘most concrete expression, before it became top-heavy with exterior trappings and ornate detail. This is a perfect speci. men of Greck art, produced at the moment when the archaic abstraction became humanized but not yet over-humanized. ‘She is perfect,’ he said and he meant that the image was of theaccepted classic period, Periclean orjust pre-Periclean; he ‘meant that there was noscratch or flaw, nodentin the surface or stain on the metal, no fold of the peplum worn down or eroded away. He wasspeakingasan ardent lover of art and an art-collector. He was speaking in a double sense, itis true, but hhe was speaking of value, the actual intrinsic value of the piece; ikea Jew, he wasassessing its worth; the blood of Abra- hham, Isaac, and Jacob ran in his veins. He knew his material pound, his pound of flesh, if you will, but this pound of flesh was a pound of spirit between us, something tangible, to be weighed and measured, to be weighed in the balance and — pray God ~ not tobe found wanting! 53 Hena satp, he had dared tosay that thedream had its worth and value in translatable terms, not the dream merely of a “70° WRITING ON THE WALL Pharaoh or a Pharaoh’s butler, not the dream merely of the favorite child of Israel, not merely Joseph’s dream or Jacob’s dream of a symbolic ladder, not the dream only of the Cumaean Sybil of Italy or the Delphic Priestess of ancient Greece, but the dream of everyone, everywhere. Hehad dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in ‘man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a gteat stream or ocean underground, and the vast depth of that ‘ocean was the same vast depth that today, as in Joseph's day, overflowing in man’s small consciousness, produced inspiration, madness, creative idea, or the dregs of the dreariest symptoms of mental unrest and disease, He had dared to say that it was the same ocean of universal con- sciousness, and even if not stated in so many words, he had dared to imply that this consciousness proclaimed all men one; all nations and races met in the universal world of the dream; and he had dared to say that the dream-symbol could be interpreted; its language, itsimagery were common to the whole race, not only of the living but of those ten thousand years dead. The picture-writing, the hieroglyph of the dream, was the common property of the whole race; in the dream, ‘man, asat the beginning of time, spoke a universal language, and man, meeting in the universal understanding of the unconscious or the subconscious, would forgo barriers of time and space, and man, understanding man, would save mankind, 54 Worn prectse Jewish instinct for the particular in the general, for the personal in the impersonal or universal, for the material in the abstract, he had dared to plunge into the unexplored TeTRIBUTE TO FREUD depth, first of his own unconscious or subconscious being. From it, he dredged, as samples of his theories, his own dreams, exposing them asserious discoveries, facts, with cause and effect, beginning and end, often showing from even the most trivial dream sequence the powerful dramatic impact that projected it. He took the events of the day preceding the night of the dream, the dream-day as he called it; he unra- velled from the mixed conditions and contacts of the ordinary affairs of life the particular thread that went on spinning its Jength through the substance of the mind, the buriedmind, the sleeping, the unconscious or subconscious mind. The thread so eagerly identified as part of the pattern, part of some com- monplace or some intricate or intimate matter of the waking life, would as likely as not be lost, at the precise moment when, identified, it showed its shimmering or its drab dream-sub- stance. The sleeping mind was not one, not all equally sleep- ing; part of the unconscious mind would become conscious at aleast expected moment; this part of the dreaming mind that laid traps or tricked the watcher or slammed doors on the scene or the unravelling tapestry of the dream sequence he called the Censor; it was guardian at the gates of the under- world, like the dog Cerberus, of Hell. 55 In THE DREAM MaTTER were Heaven and Hell, and he spared himself and his first avidly curious, mildly shocked readers neither. He did not spare himself or his later growing public, but others he spared. He would break off a most interesting dream-narrative, to explain that personal matter, concerning not himself, had intruded. Know thyself, said the ironic Delphic +72 WRITING ON THE WALL med the utterance knew yracle, and the sage or priest who frat that tcknow yourselfin the full sense ofthe words wasto know ‘everybody. Know thyself, said the Professor, and plunging time sand again, he amassed that store of intimate ory oa ained in his i imes. But to know thyself, to jined in his impressive volu fea forth the knowledge, brought down not only astorm lai from high-placed doctors, psychologists scents and ober accredited intellectuals the world over, but ma‘ ame almost a by-word for illiterate quips, unseemly jokes, and general ridicule, 56 + Lavon at the jokes, [don't know. His beautiful tout seemed alway slighty smiling, though Ni ees, st deep and slightly asymmetrical under the domed forehea (with thosefurrowscut bya master chisel) were unrevealing Hiseyes did notspeakome. Teannotevensay tat they were sadeyes fata momentoflatess-aswhent went him that day when all the doors in Vienna were closed and the streets empty = there came that pause that sometimes fel between tise sensing somealmest unbearable anxiety and tension in me, would break this spell with some kindly old ord eo ten, some question: What had I ben reading? Did I fn the books T wanted in the ibrary his wife's sister had recom- mended? Of course - fT wanted any ofhisbooks at any ime Had I heard again from Bryher, from my daughter: rica? ae eld kav taken thehour-lassin myhandand seit other way round so that the sands of his life would have as many years to run forward as now ran backward. Or I would “73‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD have slipped through a secret door ~ only I would have the ight todo this ~and entreat a kindly Being. (Only Icould do this, for my gift must be something different.) would change my years for his; it would not be as generous a number as I could have wished for him, yet it would make a difference. Perhaps there would be twenty years, even thirty years left in my hour-glass, ‘Look,’ I would say to this kindly Being, ‘those two on your shelf there - just make the slightest alteration of the hour-glasses. Put H.D. in the place of Sigmund Freud (I still have a few years left in which to tidy up my not very important affairs) It’s not too much to ask of you. And it can bedone, Someone did it or offered todoitin a play once. It was a Greek play, wasn’t it? A woman ~ I don’t remember her name - offered her years in exchange - to someone else ~ for something. What was it? There was Hercules or Herakles and astruggle with Death, Was the play called A cestis? I wonder. And of course, one of those three must have written - there they are on the top of the Professor's case, to the right of the wide-opened double door that leads into his inner sanctum, Aeschylus? Sophocles? Euripides? Who wrote the Alcestis? But it doesn’t really matter who wrote it, forthe play is going on now ~at any rate we are acting it, the old Professor and I. The old Professor doubles the part, He is Hercules struggling with Death and he is the beloved, about to die, Moreover he himself, in his own character, has made the dead live, has summoned a host of dead and dying children from the living tomb.” 57 Wien satp to im one day that time went too quickly (did he or didn’t he feel that?) he struck a semi-comic attitude, he “74 WRITING ON THE WALL is arm forward as ifironically addressing an invisible pre oran imaginary audience. ‘Time, he said. The word was utered in his inimitable, two-edged manner; he seemed to defy the creature, the abstraction; into that one wor seemed to pack a store of contradictory emotions; t ove irony, enteaty, defiance, with a vague, tender pathos Te seemed as if she word was surcharged, an explosive tha might, at any minute, goof (Many of hi words di a sense explode blastingdoven prisons, uselesdyesand dams, bringing down landless true, but opening up mines of hidden treasure.) ‘Time,’ he said again, more quietly, an en, time gallops.” Time re arorawithal? Tseonderitheknew that he was quot ing Shakespeare? Though the exact application of Rosalind’ elaborate quip about Time hardly seems appropriate. Who doth he gallop witha” asks Orlando, And Rosalind answers, “With a thief to the gallows; for though he goas softly as Foo can fal, he thinks himself oo soon there.” But a thie cer tainly;in a greater dramatic tradition, he had stolen fire, li Prometheus, from heaven, 58 srop tute! But nothing could stop him, once he started tearing buried treasures (he called it striking oil), And anyhow, wasn't this own? Hadn't he found i But stp thie they shouted or worse. He was nonchalantly unlocking vaults and caves, taking down the barriersthatgenerationshad care- fully setup against their hidden motives, thes secret ambi- sions, their suppressed desires. Stop hie? Admit however, that what he offered as treasure, this revelation that he seem “75+TRIBUTE TO FREUD vah lue, was poor stuff, trash indeed, ideas that a rag be y , ragpicker ould pass over indian, old junk stored in the attic, put away, forgotten, not even worth the trouble of cutting up fo frewond cumbersome at that fico move, and more over if you started to move one unwieldly cumbersome id you might dislodge the whole cartload of junk, it had been there such along time twas almost part of the wall andthe attic ceiling of the house of life. Stop thief] But why ling jut why, after all, stop him? His so-called discoveries were patently "diculous Time gallops withal ... with a thief to the gallows. And give a man enough rope - we have heard somewhere - and he will hang himself! 59 He was a Litre sUxPRIseD at the outburst thoughe that detached and lofty practhioners aed men of science could be so angry at what was, after al, chapter and verse, a contribution toa branch of abstract thought, applied tomedical science. He had worked with the famous Dr. Char- cotin Paris. Thereare other names that figurein the historical account given us by Professor Freud himselfin his short Aulo- biographical Study. We have the names of doctors, famous spe- cialists, who gave an idea to Freud; we have Freud himself impartially dividing honors between Breuer (or whoever it happens to be) and Freud. We have Freud himself givin Freud credit for the discovery of the cocaine anesthesia attributed to Koller. But when I asked the analyst Walter Schmideberg when and how the Professor happened on the idea that led to his linking up neurotic states of megalomani and aggrandizement with, in certain instances, fantasies of “76° WRITING ON THE WALL youth and childhood, he answered me correctly and conven- tionally; he said that Freud did not happen on ideas. I won- der? And said I wondered. But Mr. Schmideberg repeated what already, of course, I was supposed to know, that the whole established body of work was founded on accurate and accumulated data of scientific observation. That isnot what I ‘asked. I wanted to know at what exact moment, and in what manner, there came that flash of inspiration, that thing that licked, that sounded, that shouted in the inner Freud mind, heart, or soul, this isi. ‘But things don’t happen like that, Or do they? At least we are free to wonder. We ourselves are free to imagine, to reconstruct, toseeeven, as ina play or film, those characters, in their precise setting, the Paris of that period, 1885. Dr. Char- ‘cot was concerned with hysteria and neurotics this side of the border-line. That border-line, it is true, was of necessity but vaguely indicated; there were hysterics, neurotics on this side and the actual insane on the other but there wasa wide gap for all that, an unexplored waste-land, a no-man’s-land between them, At least there was a no-man’s-land; at least there were cases that not so very long ago would have been isolated as insane that now came under a milder rule, the kingdom of hysteria. The world of medical knowledge had made vast strides for there was still a memory in the minds of the older generations of eye-witness tales of atime, herein this very city, when the inmates of the insane asylums were fastened with chains, like wild beasts, to the walls or to iron rails or stakes; moreover, the public was admitted atstated intervals to view the wild animals in the course of a holiday tour of the city. ‘That time was past, not so very long past, itis true, yet past, due to the humanitarian efforts of the preceding generation of scientists and doctors. They had progressed certainly. And our Professor could, in point of fact, have visited the more “7TRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘modern’ foundations of that time and place. Paris? He was a stranger. 1870 was by no means forgotten. He had scen the fangs of the pack during hisstudent days. He writes ofhisearly daysat the Universityin Vienna, ‘Abovealll,I found that] was expected to feel myself inferior and alien because Iwasa Jew.’ He adds, ‘I refused absolutely to do the first of these things But there were others, here in Paris, inferiors, aliens certainly, who dwelt apart from their fellow men, not chained, though still (in more human surroundings) segregated, separated, in little rooms, we may conclude, or cells with bars before the windows or doors. An improvement certainly. They too ‘refused absolutely’ to feel themselves inferior. On the con- trary. These were special cases, but there was the great crowd at large, under observation at the Salpétriére. But among the hysterical cases under Charcot’s observation and the insane of the young Freud’s own private consideration, there were incidents, unnoted or minimized by the various doctors and observers, which yet held matter worth grave consideration, He noted how the disconnected sequence of the apparently unrelated actions of certain of the patients yet suggested a sort of order, followed a pattern like the broken sequence of events inahalf-remembered dream, Dream? Was the dream then, in its tum, projected or suggested by events in the daily life, was the dream the counter-coin side of madness or was madness a waking dream? There was an odd element of tragedy some- times, something not always wholly on the physical or sordid material level. It was Hell, of course. But these people in Hell sometimes bore strange resemblance to things he had remem- bered, things he had read about, old kings in old countries, women broken by wars, and enslaved, distorted children, ‘There were bars before some of the cells in this scene built up Purely from our own intuitive imagination), yet these cages sometimes presented scenes as from a play. Caesar “78+ WRITING ON THE WALL strated there, There Hannibal - Hannibal? Why Hannibal ‘As a boy he himself had worshipped Hannibal, imagine: himself in the réle of world-conqueror. But every boy at some time or another strutted with imaginary sword and armor, ney by? This man, this Caesar, who flung his tga over his arm with anot altogether unauthenti gesture, might simply be living out some childish fantasy. I he could examine the patient in suitable surroundings— but the patient shouted et fu Brute and became violent at any suggestion of approach or friendly contact. If he could have interviewed this Caesar a few yearsback—he hadbeena manofsome prominence atone time — he might have been able to worm out of him the secret ofhis Caesar mania. Themind wasclouded now but there was no reportin this ase of actual tissue decay or the usual physi cal symptoms that end inevitably in madness. Caesar? Han nibal? These were outstanding recognizable a. ssonages, But were these the entities that caused this —fixa- Hows a word nt yt coined in thi connection. Thi man was acting a part, Caesar. Caesar? He himself, as a child, enacted asimilarréle, Hannibal. But wasit Hannibal? Was it Caesar? Was it - ? Well, yes ~ it might be - how odd. Yes - it could be! tmightbethisman’sfathernow thathe wasimper- sonating — wasn't the father the Caesar, the conqueror the symbol of power, the Czar, Kaiser, the King in the childs Kingdom ~ admittedly smal but tothe child of vast world wide importance, the world to him, his home. The whole world fora child is its home, its father, mother, brothers, sis- ters, and so on~its choo! later and friends from ater ‘king dom.’ Why, yes—how cleritall was- this Caesar now? How hhad it come about? There must be something behind this col- lapsenotnotedintherecord ofthepatien'sphysical andeven mental conditions and symptoms. There must be something else behind many of the cases here and at the Salpétriére-not “79+‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD all of them - but some of them ~ and other cases. .. . There must be something behind the whole build-up of present-day medical science - there must be something further on or deeper down - there must be something that would reveal the secrets of these states of glorified personality and other states and conditions - there must be something. . .. Why, Hanni- bal! Thereis Caesar behind bars -hereis Hannibal, heream I, Sigmund Freud, watching Caesar behind bars. But it was Caesar who was conqueror ~ was he? ~ I came, I saw, I con- quered - yes, Iwill conquer. Iwill. I, Hannibal —not Caesar. I, the despised Carthaginian, I, the enemy of Rome. I, Hanni- bal. So you see, I, Sigmund Freud, myself standing here, a favoriteand gifted, admitit, student of Dr. Charcot, innoway toall appearances deranged or essentially peculiar, true tomy own orbit — true tomy ownorbit? True to my own orbit, my child- hood fantasies of Hannibal, my identification with Hannibal, the Carthaginian (Jew, not Roman) ~ I, Sigmund Freud, understand this Caesar. I, Hannibal! ‘And Caesar’s wife too (if we may continue our build-up of this purely imaginative sequence of cause and effect), there is Caesar's wife to be considered. This particular lady was not even an out-patient of this particular institution, but she might soon be. She was found lingering in the waiting room, after the others had left. She was always demanding inter- views with the doctors and the superintendent himself, get- ting in everyone’s way. It was becoming quite a feature with the institution, the superintendent had left special orders that hewas not tobe disturbed, he had been compelled to deny her the last private interview she demanded; the famous special- ist was overworked, there was too much to be done here, every- where, trying personal entanglements must be avoided at all ‘costs. Personal entanglements? But this good lady would be the first to decry any such shadow of design on her part. But +80+ WRITING ON THE WALL wasn’t that her trouble? She had been devoted to her hus- band, the separation was affecting her, she herself seemed on. the verge of a serious breakdown. That was only natural, wasn’tit, under the tragic circumstances? But this sort of sup~ pressed neurotie symptom ~ symptom? This sort of separation between two people long married and devoted might have serious repercussions, actually throw the whole nervous sys- tem out of gear, unbalance the delicately adjusted mecha- nism of the mind itself. Her worry had worn on her ~ poor woman - and no wonder. Someone should look after her. But she was not even an out-patient, it wasn’t their business to probe into the personal affairs of the patients’ wives and fam- ilies, Affairs? Cacsat’s wife? Yes, she was Caesar's wife, obvi- ously above suspicion, a conventional woman yet a woman of the world, Such things had happened before. Where was his thought taking him? There had been other cases here ~ that girl whose happiness at the news of her husband's possible return from Algiers after a long absence had so improved her condition that Dr. Charcot, consulted in this instance, had himself suggested her leaving the hospital for a time. Her health, it was reported, had improved after her return to her husband, but if her husband went awway again would her symptoms retum? 60 ‘Tints oaviousty 18 Nor an historical account of the prelimi- nary steps that ed to theestablishmentofanew branch of psy- chological research and a new form of healing called psychoanalysis. The actual facts are accessible to any serious student of Professor Freud’s work, But itseems tome it might “81+an | TRIBUTE TO FREUD have been through some such process of inner reasoning that the theme opened. The thee? T write the word and weniee why Iwrite it. Itseemed to me to suggest music - yes, musical terms do seem relevant to the curious and original process of the Professor's intuitive reasoning that led up to, developed amplified, simplified the first astonishing findings of the young Viennese doctor whom the diagnoses of his elders and bettershad not alwayssatisfied. Itwas notonly thatthe young Sigmund Freud was astute, methodical, conscientious subtle, clever, original - though he was all these. It was not only that he came from a race that had venerated learning and (like the Arabs) had preserved, in spite of repeated per- seutions singular fring for medicine, along with math- matics and certain forms of abstract philosophy an« ata time when (as now) the liberal ard apphed ars seem overshadowed with the black wing of man’s growing power of destruction and threat of racial separateness. He stood alone and we may imagine that he was singularly proud, though of $0 genial a nature, so courteous a manner, and so delicate a witshe was easy to get on with, he could discourse delightfully on any subject, at any time, with anybody. But what was it about him? His appearance, his habits, his way of life were conventional enough; even his worstenemiescould find noth- ing to criticize about his private lifes he was strictly correct, almost orthodox, you might say. : ° The point was that for all his amazing originality, he was drawing from a source so deep in human consciousness that the outerrock or shale, the accumulation of hundredsor thou- sands of years of casual, slack, or even wrong or evil thinkin; had all but sealed up the original spring er well-head. He called it striking oil, but others — long ago ~ had dipped into that same spring, They called it ‘a well of living water in the old days, or simply the ‘still waters. The Professor spoke of +82: WRITING ON THE WALL this source of inspiration in terms of oil. Itfocused the abstrac- tion, made it concrete,amodern businesssymbol. Although it was obvious that he was speaking of vague, vast abstraction, he used a common, almost a commonplace, symbol for it. He used the idiom or slang of the counting-house, of Wall Street, a business man’s concrete definite image for a successful run of luck or hope of success in the if-we-should-strike-oil or old-so- and-so-has-struck-oil-again manner. ‘I struck oil but there is enough left for fifty, for one hundred years or more.’ Itis diffi- cult toimagine the Professor saying solemnly, I drew by right of inheritance from the great source of inspiration of Israel and the Psalmist - Jeremiah, some might call me. Istumbled on a well of living water, the river of life. It ran muddy or bright. It was blocked by fallen logs, some petrified and an accumulation of decaying leaves and branches. I saw the course of the river and how it ran, and I, personally, cleared away abit ofrubbish, sothat atleastasmallsection of the river should run clear. There isa lot yet to be done - fora hundred years or more - so that all men, all nations, may gather together, understanding in the end. ...” But no, that was not the Professor's way of talking. ‘I struck oil” suggests business enterprise. We visualize stark uprights and skeleton-like ste! ‘cages, like unfinished Eiffel Towers. And there are many, I have reason to know, who think ofthe whole method or system of psychoanalysis in some such terms, a cage, some mechani- cal construction set up in an arid desert, to trap the unwary, and if there is‘oil’ to be inferred, the ‘oil’ goes to someone else; there are astute doctors who ‘squeeze you dry’ with their exorbitant fees for prolonged and expensive treatments. A tiresome subject at best - have nothing todo with it it’s worn out, dated; true, it was fashionable enough among the young intellectuals after the First World War but they turned out a dreary lot and who, after all, has heard of any of them since? 83+TRIBUTE TO FREUD 61 ‘Tinesome 1NDEED! So is Aeschylus tiresome to most people, so is Sophocles, so is Plato and that old Socrates with his tedious matter and his more than tedious manner. The Socratic method? That wasa business of egging on an intellectual con- testant, almost in the manner of a fencer with pin-pricks — wasn’ tit? — or sword-pricks of prodding questions that would eventually bring the debatable matter to a head, so that the fight could be open and above-board, unless the rival were slain in the preliminary clash of intellectual steel. There was something of that in the Professor’s method of analytic treat- ment, but there was a marked difference. The question must be propounded by the protagonist himself, he must dig it out from its buried hiding-place, he himself must find the ques- tion before it could be answered. 62 He tmseir must clear away his own rubbish, before his par- ticularstream, his personal life, could run clear of obstruction into the great river of humanity, hence to the sea of super- human perfection, the ‘Absolute,’ as Socrates or Plato called it, 63 Bur we are here today in a city of ruin, a world ruined, it ‘might seem, almost past redemption. We must forgo a flight from reality into the green pastures or the cool recesses of the +84: WRITING ON THE WALL ‘Academe; though those pastures and those gardens have out- lasted many ruined cities and threat of world ruin; we are not ready for discussion of the Absolute, Absolute Beauty, Abso- lute Truth, Absolute Goodness. We have rested in the pas- tures, we have wandered beside those still waters, we have sensed the fragrance of the myrtle thickets beyond distant hedges, and the groves of flowering citrons. Kennst du das Land? ‘Oh yes, Professor, I know it very well. But Iam remembering the injunction you laid upon me and I am thinking of my fel- low-pupil whose place you say I have taken, my brother-in- arms, the Flying Dutchman, who, intellectually gifted beyond the ordinary run of man, endowed with Eastern islands and plantations, trained to a Western discipline of mind and body, yet flew too high and flew too quickly, 64 ‘Tue proressor is speaking to me very seriously. This isin his study in Vienna a few weeks after I had first begun my work there. ‘I am asking only one thing of you,’ he said. Even as write the words, Ihave the same sense of anxiety, of tension, of imminent responsibility that Ihad at that moment. What can he possibly be going to say? What can he ask me todo? Or not, todo? More likely a shalt not than a demand for some specific act or course of action, His manner was serious yet kindly. Yet inspite of that or because of that, I felt like a child, summoned tomy father’s study or my mother’s sewing room or told by a teacher to wait in after school, after the others had left, for those ‘few words’ that were for myself alone. Siop thief! What had I done? What was I likely to do? ‘I ask only one thing of you children’ - my mother’s very words. “85+TRIBUTE TO FREUD 65 For THE proressor is standing in his study. The Professor is asking only one thing of me. I was right in my premonition, it isa shalt not. He is asking something of me, confiding in me, treating me in his courteous, subtle way as an intellectual equal. He is very firm about this, however, and he is patiently explaining it to me. ‘Of course, you understand’ is the offhand way in which he offers me, from time to time, some rare dis- covery, some priceless finding, or ‘Perhaps you may feel differ- ently,’ as if my feelings, my discoveries, were on a par with his own. He does not lay down the law, only this once - this one law. He ays, ‘Please, never ~Imean, never at any time, in any circumstance, endeavor to defend me, if and when you hear abusive remarks made about me and my work.’ He explained it carefully. He might have been giving a lesson in geometry or demonstrating the inevitable course ofa disease once the virus has entered thesystem. At this point, he seemed to indicate (as if there were a chart of a fever patient, pinned on the wall before us), at the least suggestion that you may be about to begin acounter-argument in my defense, the anger or the frustration of the assailant will be driven deeper. You will do no good to the detractor by mistakenly beginning a logical defense. You will drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper. You will do no good to yourself, for you will only expose your own feelings~I take for granted that you have deep feelings about my discoveries, or you would not be here. Youwill dono good tomeand my work, for antagonism, once taking hold, cannot be rooted out from above the su face, and it thrives, in a way, on heated argument and digs deeper. The only way to extract the fear or prejudice would be +86 WRITING ON THE WALL from within, from below, and as naturally this type of prej- udiced or frightened mind would dodge any hint of a sugges- tion of psychoanalytic treatment or even, put it, study and research along these lines, you cannot get at the root of the trouble. Every word, spoken in my defense, I mean, to already prejudiced individuals, serves to drive the root in deeper. If the matter is ignored, the attacker may forgo his anger - or in time, even, his unconscious mind may find another object on which to fixits tentacles. "This was the gist of the matter. In our talks together he rarely used any of the now rather overworked technical terms, invented by himself and elaborated on by the growing body of doctors, psychologists, and nerve specialists who form the somewhat formidable body ofthe International Psycho-Ana- lytical Association. When, on one occasion, I was endeavoring toexplainamatterin which my mind tugged twoways 1 said, “Tsuppose you would say it wasa matter of ambivalence?” And ashedid notanswer me, Isaid, ‘Ordoyou say am-bi-valence? I don’t know whether it’s pronounced ambi-valence or am-bi- valence.’ The Professor’s arm shot forward as it did on those occasions when he wished to stressa finding or focus my atten- tion to some point in hand; he said, in his curiously casual ironical manner, ‘Do you know, I myself have always won- dered. I often wish that I could find someone to explain these matters to me.’ 66 ‘Tere was so Mucit to be explained, so little time in which to do it. My serpent-and-thistle motive, for instance, or Leitmo- tiv, Thad almost written. It was a sign, a symbol certainly ~it “87°‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD musthave been ~ buteven if had found anotherseal-ring like the one I saw in Paris, among that handful of old rings in the corner of the shelf in the other room, it wouldn’t have proved anything and might have led us oo farafield ina discussion or reconstruction of cause and effect, which might indeed have included priceless treasures, gems, and jewels, among the so- called findings of the unconscious mind revealed by the dream-content or associated thought and memory, yet have side-tracked the issue in hand. My serpent and thistle ~ what did it remind me of? There was Aaron’s rod, of course, which ‘when flung to the ground turned intoa living reptile. Reptile? Aaron’s rod, if Tam not mistaken, was originally the staff of Moses. There was Moses in the bulrushes, ‘our’ dream and ‘our’ Princess, There was the ground, cursed by God because ‘Adam and Eve had eaten of the Fruitof the Tree. Henceforth, it would bring forth thorns and thistles - thorns, thistles, the words conjure up the same scene, the barren, unproductive waste or desert. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? ‘Another question, another question mark, a half-S, the other way round, 5 for seal, symbol, serpent certainly, signet, Sigraund. 67 StoMunn, the singing voice; no, it is Siegmund really, the vie- torious mouth or voice or utterance. There was Victory, our sign on the wall, our hieroglyph, our writing. There was the tiny bronze, his favoriteamong the semicircle of the Godsor as ‘other people read: Goods’ on his table. There was Niké, Vie- tory, and Niké A-pteros, the Wingless Victory, for Victory could never, would never fly away from Athens. There was “88+ WRITING ON THE WALL ‘Athens, a city set on a hill; hill, mountain; there was Berg- ggasse, the hill, Berg, and the path or street or way, gasse. There were designs, weren’t there, of acanthus leaves to crown upright Corinthian capitals? And the Latin acanthus, and the related Greek word akantha, is thorn or prickle. There were patterns, decorative hieroglyphs of acanthus leaves, a very classic symbol; and there was a crown, we have been told, in the end, of thorns. 68 Bur to our :1rr1e abridged Greek Lexicon, to verify akantha. Yes — as from aké, a point, edge, hence a prickly plant, thistle; alsoa thorny tree. A thon tree, Was our thistle the sign or sigil of all thorny trees? Perhaps even of that singularly prickly “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil with its attendant Serpent. There were, and are, many varieties of serpents ‘There was, among many others, that serpent of Wisdom that crouched at the feet of the goddess Athené and was one of her attributes, like the spear (aké, a point) she held in her hand - though we cannot be sure that it was a spear that the Profes- sor’s perfect little bronze once held in her hand. It might have beena rod or staff. 69 ‘Tuy ro anp THY starr. In England, our American gold- enrod, that runs riot in the late-summer fields and along every laneand at the edge of every strip of woodland, iscultivated in 89°TRIBUTE TO FREUD tidy clumps in gardens, and is called Aaron’s rod. The gold enrod brings us to the Golden Bough; it was to Plato that Meleager, in the Greek Anthology, attributed the golden bough, ever shining with its own light. And the Professor, one winter day, offered me a little branch. He explained that his son in the South of France had posted (or sent by some acquaintance returning to Vienna from the Midi) a box of ‘oranges, and some branches with leaves were among them. He thought I might like this. I took the branch, a tiny tree in itself, with its cluster of golden fruit. I thanked the Professor. At least, I murmured some platitude, ‘How lovely - how charming of you’ or some such. Did he know, did he ever know, or did he ever not-know, what Iwas thinking? I did not say what had no time to formulate into words-orif Thad had time for other than a superficial ‘How lovely ~ how perfectly charming,’ I could not have trusted myself to say the words. ‘They were there. They were singing. They went on singing like an echo of an echo ina shell - very far away yet very near = the very shell substance of my outer ear and the curled involuted or convoluted shell skull, and inside the skull, the curled, intricate, hermit-like mollusk, the brain-matter itself, ‘Thoughtsare things~ sometimes they are songs. did not have torecall the words, I had not written them. Another mollusk ina hard cap of bone or shell had projected these words. There wasa songset tothem, that till another singingskull had fash- ioned, No, not Schumann’s music - lovely as it is there was a song we sang as school-children, another setting to the words. ‘And even the words sing themselves without music, so it does not matter that Ihave not been able to identify the ‘tune’ as we lilted it. Kennst du das Land? +90+ WRITING ON THE WALL 70 Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blithn? ‘Tue worps neTuRN with singular freshness and poignancy, as 1, after this long time of waiting, am able to remember with- out unbearable terror and overwhelming heartbreak those sessions in Vienna. The war closed on us, before I had time to sort out, relive, and reassemble the singular series of events and dreams that belonged in historical time to the 1914-1919 period. I wanted to dig down and dig out, root out my per- sonal Weeds, strengthen my purpose, reaffirm my beliefs, canalize my energies, and I seized on the unexpected chance of working with Professor Freud himself. I could never have ‘thought it possible to approach him, nor even have thought of inquiring if it were possible, ifit had not been for Dr. Sachs’s suggestion, I had had some fascinating, preliminary talks with Dr. Hanns Sachs in Berlin and wanted to go on with the work, but he was leaving for America. Dr. Sachs asked me if would consider working with the Professor if he would take me? If he would take me? It seemed sucha fantasticsuggestion and to my mind highly unlikely that Freud himself would consider me as analysand or student. But if the Professor wouldacceptme, would have nochoice whatever in the mat- ter. [ would go to him, of course. 71 I wave sat earlier in these notes that the Professor's explanations were too illuminating or too depressing. [meant “91+‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD that in some strange way we had managed to get at the root of things, today, we have tunneled very deep; and in another still stranger way, we had approached the clearest fountain-head of highest truth, asin the luminous real dream of the Princess and the river which was in the realm of what is known gener- ally as the supernormal; it was a scene or picture from those realms from which the illuminati received their - ‘credentials’ seemsa strange wordas I write it, but it ‘wrote itself.’ My Prin- cess picture was one of an exquisite, endless sequence from an illuminated manuscript, and has ts place in that category among books and manuscripts; the dream, you may remember, [said in the beginning, varies like the people we meet, like the books we read. The books and the people merge in this world of fan- tasy and imagination; nonetheless we may differentiate with the utmost felicity and fidelity between dreams and the types, of different fantasies; there are the most trivial and tiresome dreams, the newspaper class ~ but even there is, in an old newspaper, sometimes a hint of eternal truth, or a quotation from a great man’s speech or some tale of heroism, among the trashy and often sordid and trivial record of the day’s events. ‘The printed page varies, cheap news-print, good print, bad print, smudged and uneven print there are the great letter words of an advertisement or the almost invisible pin-print; there are the huge capitalsofachild’salphabet chart or build- ing blocks; letters or ideas may run askew on the page, as it were; they may be purposeless; they may be stereotyped and not meant for ‘reading’ but as a test, as for example the sym- metrical letters that don’t of necessity ‘spell’ anything, on a doctor’s or oculist’s chart hung on the wall in an office or above a bed in a hospital. There are dreams or sequences of dreams that follow a line like a graph on a map or show a jag- ged triangular pattern, like a crack on a bow! that shows the bowl or vase may at any moment fall in pieces; we all know 92+ WRITING ON THE WALL that almost invisible thread-line on the cherished glass but- ter-dish that predictsit will come apartin me’ands’ sooner or later ~ sooner, more likely. “There are all these shapes, lines, graphs, the hieroglyph of the unconscious, and the Professor had first opened the field to the study of this vast, unexplored region. He himself - at least to me personally ~ deplored the tendency to ixideas too firmly to set symbols, or to weld them inexorably. Itis true that he him- self started to decipher or decode the vast accumulation of the material of the unconscious mind; it was he who ‘struck oil” but the application of the ‘oil,’ what could or should be made ofit, could not be entirely regulated or supervised by its origi- nal promoter,’ He struck oil; certainly there was ‘something init; yes, a vast field for exploration and - alas ~ exploitation lay open, There were the immemorial Gods ranged in their semicircle on the Professor’s table, that stood, as I have said, like the high altar in the Holy of Holies. There were those Gods, each the carved symbol of an idea or a deathless dream, that some people read: Goods. 72 ‘Twere ane THE wise and the foolish virgins and their several lamps. Thou ancintest my head with oil ~ the oil of understanding ~ and, indeed, my cup runneth over. But this purposes to be a per sonal reconstruction of intention and impression. Thad begun my preliminary research in order to fortify and equip myself to face war when it came, and to help in some subsidiary way, ifmy training were sufficient and my aptitudes suitable, with ‘war-shocked and war-shattered people. But my actual per- sonal war-shock (1914-1919) did not have a chance. My ses- sions with the Professor were barely under way, before there 193+TRIBUTE TO FREUD were preliminary signs and symbols of the approaching ordeal. And the thing I primarily wanted to fight in the open, war, its cause and effect, with its inevitable aftermath of neu- rotic breakdown and related nerve disorders, was driven deeper. With the death-head swastika chalked on the pave- ment, leading to the Professor's very door, I must, in all decency, calm as best I could my own personal Phobia, my ‘own personal little Dragon of war-terror, and with whatever power I could summon or command order him off, for the time being at any rate, back to his subterranean cavern, ‘There he growled and bit on hischains and was only loosed finally, when the full apocryphal terror of fire and brimstone, of whirlwind and flood and tempest, of the Biblical Day of Judgment and the Last Trump, became no longer abstrac- tions, terrors too dreadful to be thought of, but things that were happening every day, every night, and at one time, at every hour of the day and night, to myselfand my friends, and all the wonderful and all the drab and ordinary London people. 73 Anp THE KINDLY Being whom I would have entreated had wafted the old Professor outof it. He had gone before the blast and bombing and fires had devastated this city; he was a handful of ashes, cherished in an urn or scattered among the grassand flowersin one of the Gardens of Remembrance, out- side London. I suppose there must be a marble slab there on the garden wall ora little boxina niche besidea garden path. I have not even gone to look, to regard a familiar name with a date perhaps, and wander along a path, hedged with clipped 194+ WRITING ON THE WALL yew or, more likely, fragrant dust-green lavender, and think of the Professor. For our Garden of Remembrance is some- where else. Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blitkn, Imdunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen gliihn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorber steht, Kennstdueswohl? Dahin! Dahin ‘Macht ich mit dir, omein Geliebter, ziehn. Kennst du das Haus? Auf Stulen rut sein Dach, Esglinzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach, Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan? Kennstdueswohl? Dahin! Dahin ‘Macht ich mit dir, omein Beschitzer, ziehn. Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg? ‘Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg, InHohlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut, Esstiirt der Fels und itber ihn die Plut; Kennst du ihn wohl? Dahin! Dakin Geht unser Weg! 0 Vater, lass uns zichn! 74 Iuave saw that these impressions must take me, rather than | take them. The first impression of all takes me back to the 195+TRIBUTE TO FREUD beginning, to my first session with the Professor, Paula has opened the door (though I did not then know that the pretty little Viennese maid was called Paula). She has divested me of ‘my oat and madesome welcoming remark which hasslightly embarrassed me, as I am thinking English thoughts and only English words come to prompt me. She has shown me into the waiting room with the lace curtains at the window, with framed photographs of celebrities, some known personally to me; Dr. Havelock Ellis and Dr. Hanns Sachs gaze at me, familiar but a little distorted in their frames under the reflect- ing glass. There is the modest, treasured, framed diploma from the small New England university, which I examined later, and the macabre, detailed, Diireresque symbolic draw- ing, a ‘Buried Alive’ or of some such school of thought. I wait in this room. I know that Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud will open the door which faces me. Although I know this and have been preparing for some months for this ordeal, Iam, nonetheless, taken aback, surprised, shocked even, when the door opens. It seems to me, after my time of waiting, that he appears too suddenly. Automatically, I walk through the door. It closes. Sigmund Freud does not speak. He is waiting forme tosay something. I cannot speak. I look around the room. A lover of Greek art, I am automatically taking stock of the room’s contents. Price- lessly lovely objects are displayed here on the shelves to right, toleft of me, I have been told about the Professor, his family, his way of life. I have heard certain personal anecdotes not available to the general readers of his books. Ihave heard him lovingly criticized by his adorers and soundly berated by his enemies. I know that he had a very grave recurrence of a former serious illness, some five years or so ago, and was again operated on for that particularly pernicious form of cancer of the mouth or tongue, and that by a miracle (to the amaze- “96+ WRITING ON THE WALL mentofthe Viennese specialists) he recovered. Itseems tome, insome curious way that we were both ‘miraculously saved sme purpose. But all this is a feeling, an atmosphere ~ inething tht I realize or pereiv, but do not actually put jnto words or thoughts. [could not have said thisevenif Thad, at that moment, realized it, do know that it is a great privi- Tege tobe here this doactvally realize. 1am here because Dr Sachs suggested my coming here and wrote the Professor about me- Dr. Sachs had talked lovingly about the Professor and, sometimes in gentle irony, had spoken ofthe ‘poor Frau Professor.” But no one had told me that this room was lined swith treasures. [was to greet the Old Man of the Sea, but no ‘ne had told me ofthe treasures he had salvaged from the sea- depth 75 1s at home here. He is part and parcel of these treasures. eae a long way, I have brought nothing with me. He has his family, the tradition ofan unbroken family, reaching back through this old heart of the Roman Empire, further into the Holy Land. ‘Ah, Psyche, from the regions which ‘Are Holy Land! He is the infinitely old symbol, weighing the soul, Psyche, in the Balance. Does the Soul, passing the portalsof life, entering the House of Eternity, greet the Keeper of the Door? It seems so. I should have thought the Door-Keeper, at home beyond the threshold, might have greeted the shivering soul. Not so, the Professor. But waiting and finding that I would not or “97°‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD could not speak, he uttered. What he said ~ 0 eee eee into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me.’ _Butworse was tocome. little lion-like creature came pad- ding toward me -a lioness, as it happened. She had emerged from the inner sanctum or manifested from under or behind the couch; anyhow, she continued her course across the car- pet. Embarrassed, shy, overwhelmed, I bend down to greet this creature, But the Professor says, ‘Do not touch her ~ she snaps ~ she is very difficult with strangers.” Strangers? Is the Soul crossing the threshold astranger to the Door-Keeper? It appears so. But, though no accredited dog-lover, I like do and they oddly and sometimes unexpectedly ‘take’ to me ‘3 this is an exception, I am ready to take the risk. Unin- timidated but distressed by the Professor's somewhat for- bidding manner, I not only continue my gesture toward the little chow, but crouch on the floor so that she can snap better ifshe wantsto, Yoh ~hername's Yoh - snuggles her nose into ay pend nuzzles her head, in delicate sympathy, against 76 So cain 1 can say the Professor was not always ri . fessor was not always right. That i, % he was always right in his judgment, but my form of rightness, my intuition, sometimes functioned by the split- second (that makesall the difference in spiritual ime-compte tations) the quicker. Iwas swifterin some intuitive instances, and sometimes a small tendril of root from that great com mon Tree of Knowledge went deeper into the sub-soil. “98+ WRITING ON THE WALL were the great giant rootsof that tree, but mine, with hair-like almost invisible feelers, sometimes quivered a warning or resolved a problem, as for instance at the impact of that word stranger. We'll show him,’ retorts the invisible intuitive root- Jet; and, without forming the thought, the words ‘love me, ove my dog’ are there to prompt me. ‘He will see whether or not I am indifferent,’ my emotion snaps back, though not in ‘words, ‘If he isso wise, so clever,’ the smallest possible sub-soil rootlet gives its message, ‘you show him that you too are wise, are clever. Show him that you have ways of finding out things ‘about people, other than looking at their mere outward ordi- nary appearance.’ My intuition challenges the Professor, though not in words. That intuition cannot really be trans- lated into words, but ifit could be it would go, roughly, some- thing like this: ‘Why should I look at you? Youare contained jn the things you love, and if you accuse me of looking at the thingsin theroom before looking at you, well, Iwill goon look- ing at the things in the room. One of them is this little golden dog. Shesnaps, does she? You call mea stranger, do you? Well, will show you two things: one, Iam not astranger; two, even if were, two seconds ago, Iam now no longer one. And more- over I never was a stranger to this little golden Yofi.” “Thewordlesschallenge goeson, “Youarea very great man. I ‘am overwhelmed with embarrassment, Iam shy and fright- ened and gauche as an over-grown school-girl, But listen. You are a man, Yofi is a dog. am a woman. If this dog and this woman “take” to one another, it will prove that beyond your caustic implied criticism - if criticism itis - there is another region of cause and effect, another region of question and answer,’ Undoubtedly, the Professor took an important clue from the first reaction of a new analysand or patient. Twas, as it happened, not prepared for this. It would have been worse for me if I had been. +99TRIBUTE TO FREUD 77 WRITING ON THE WALL the Tau-cross, entwined with the serpent - exactly the figure ‘used by early Christian artists to represent the serpent which Moses lifted up in the wilderness.’ My serpent-and-thistle motive obviously bears some hidden relation to this. Tewas Asklepios of the Greeks who was called the blameless ‘physician, He was the son of the sun, Phoebos Apollo, and music and medicine were alike sacred to this source of light. ‘This half-man, half-god (Fate decreed) went a little too far when he began actually to raise the dead. He was blasted by the thunder-bolt of an avenging deity, but Apollo, over-riding his father’sanger, placed Asklepiosamong thestars. Our Pro- fessorstood this side of the portal. He did not pretend to bring back the dead who had already crossed the threshold. But he raised from dead hearts and stricken minds and maladjusted bodies a host of living children. ‘One of these children was called Mignon. Not my name certainly. Itis true I was small for my age, mignonne; but I was not, they said, pretty and I was not, it was very easy to see, quaintand quickand clever like my brother. My brother? Am I my brother's keeper? It appears so. A great many of these brothers fell on the fields of France, in that first war. A great many have fallen since. Numberless poised, disciplined, and valiant young winged Mercuries have fallen from the air, to join the great host of the dead. Leader of the Dead? That was “Hermes of the Greeks who took the attribute from Thoth of the Egyptians. The T or Tau-cross became caduceus with twined serpents, again corresponding to the T or Tau-cross that Moses lifted in the desert. ‘Am I my brother's keeper? So far as my undisciplined thoughts permit me... and further than my disciplined ones can take me. For the Professor was not always right. He did not know ~ or did he? - that [looked at the thingsin his room ‘By CHANCE On intention, started these notes on September 19th, Consulting my ‘Mysteries of the Ancients’ calendar, I find Dr. W. B. Crow has assigned this date to “Thoth, Egyp- tian form of Mercury. Bearer of the Scales of Justice. St Januarius’ And we know of Janus, the old Roman guardian of gates and doors, patron of the month of January which was sacred to him, with all ‘beginnings.’ Janus faced two ways, as doors and gates opened and shut. Here in this room, we had ourexits and our entrances. [have noted too, the four sides of the room, and touched on the prob- Jem of the fourth dimensional: the ‘additional dimension attributed tospace by a hypothetical speculation’ isthe some- what comic dictionary definition. Old Janus was guardian of the seasons too, that time-sequence of the four quarters of the year. Thoth was the original measurer, the Egyptian proto- type of the later Greek Hermes. I made the connecting link with the still later Roman Mercury, our Flying Dutchman. For myself, there was a story Iloved; I had completely for- gotten it now ti suddenly recalled. The tory was about an old light-house keeper called Captain January an wreckedchild. Brain January and 2 ship ‘We have only just begun our researches, our ‘studies’ the old Profesorand. neces our aden! 78 ‘Tus 1s oxy a beginning but I learned recently (again from Dr. Crow) that ‘the seal of the Hippocratic University bears +100- “101+TRIBUTE TO FREUD before I looked at him; for knew the things in his room were symbols of Eternity and contained him then, as Eternity con- tainshim now. 79 ‘Tats OLD Janvs, this beloved light-house keeper, old Captain January, shut the door on transcendental cine at least transferred this occult orhidden symbolism to the occult or hidden regions ofthe personal reactions, dreams, thought associations oF thought ‘transferences’ of the individual human mind. It was the human individual that concerned him, its individual reactions to the problems of every-day, the relation of the child toitsenvironment, its friends its teachers, above all its parents. As to what happened, after this life was over ... we as individuals, we as members of one brotherhood of body that contained many differen, individ. ual branches, had profited so little by the illuminating teach- ing of the Master who gave his name to our presentera, that it ‘was well fora Prophet, in the old tradition of Israel, toarise, to slam the door on visions f the future, of the afterlife, tostand himself like the Roman Centurion before the gate at Pompei who did not move from hisstation before the gateway since he received no orders todoso, and who stood for later generations to wonder at, embalmed in hardened lava, preserved in the very fire and ashes that had destroyed him “Atleast, they have not burnt me at the stake.’ Did the Pro- fessor say that of himself or did someone else say it of him? 1 thinkhe himselfsaidit, Butitwasanear-miss...even literally - and last night, here in London, there were the familiar siren-shrieks, the alerts, each followed by its even more ear- Piercing and soul-shattering ‘all-clear,’ which coming as a +102+ WRITING ON THE WALL sort of aftermath or after-birth of the actual terror is the more devastating. Released from the threat of actual danger, we have time tothinkaboutit. And the ‘alerts’ and the ‘all-clears’ are punctuated by sound of near or far explosions, at three in the morning, after seven and at lesser intervals... . the war is not yet over. Erosand Death, those twowere the chief subjects ~ in fact, the only subjects ~ of the Professor's eternal pre~ occupation. They are still gripped, struggling in the dead- lock. Hercules struggled with Death and is still struggling. But the Professor himself proclaimed the Herculean power of Eros and we know that it was written from the beginning that Loves stronger than Death. Tewas the very love of humanity that caused the Professor to stand guardian at the gate. Beliefin the soul’s survival, inalife after death, wrote the Professor, was the last and greatest fan- tasy, the gigantic wish-fulfillment that had built up, through the ages, the elaborate and detailed picture of an after-life. He may even have believed this. If so, it was proof again of his Centurion courage. He would stand guardian, he would turn the whole stream of consciousness back into useful, into irriga- tion channels, so that none of this power be wasted. He would clean the Augean stables, he would tame the Nemean lion, he would capture the Erymanthian boar, he would clear the Stymphalian birds from the marshes of the unconscious mind. These things must be done. He indicated certain ways in which they might be done. Until we have completed our twelve labors, he seemed to reiterate, we (mankind) have no right to reston cloud-cushion fantasiesand dreamsof an after- life. From the reasoning upper layers of the thinking mind, he would shut off this dream of heaven, this hope of eternal life. Someone writes somewhere of Sigmund Freud’s courageous pessimism. He had little hope for the world. He knew why +103°TRIBUTE TO FREUD people laughed at his first findings, at his Interpretation Dreans, his Delusion and Dream, and the rest of them, He answered his first ribald detractors with his essay on wit and humor-T think itis impossible to assess this or appreciateit in the translation ~ but even a superficial observer of his manner of approach to his antagonists would have to grant that the of his wit, given a worthy adversary to measure it by, would have none to rival it. He did not wish to prove people «wrong, he wanted only to show them the way and show them that others had imposed ideas on them that might eventually prove destructive. He even wrote a later, reasoned, calm, and dispassionate essay on the causes for the resurgi See the resurging hatred of 80 ‘Ture wasanother Jew whosaid, the ki who said, the kingdom of heaven is within Jou. Hee said: unless you becomeas litle childvenyou shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 81 Others abide our question. Thow art fee. Weask and ask ~ Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Whe tothe stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place ‘Spares but the cloudy border of his base Tothe foil'd searching of mortality “104+ WRITING ON THE WALL And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school’d self-scann’d, self-honous’d, slf-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess’d at, ~ Better so! Allpains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. Twas impelled (almost compelled) to copy this out. Its, of course, Matthew Arnold’s familiar sonnet to Shakespeare. I had not intended to include it in these notes, but perhaps my subconscious or unconscious mind recognized an intellectual family-likeness in ‘that victorious brow.’ And in this very last line, there is a sort of Elizabethan conceit or posy, a hidden reference ~a purely personal finding, but for our purpose curi- ously compelling. We have victorious or victory, Sieg, and the sole voice, the voice, or speech, or utterance, Mund, Sigmund. ‘There is this, this sonnet, as if written for us, for this occasion, for this memoir and there is the more personal lyricof the Ger- man poet, Goethe, to which I have referred earlier in these notes. I cannot recall the musical setting - not Schumann's ~ that I and a group of my contemporaries sang as school-chil- dren, But about the Professor, there was music certainly; there was music in every syllable he uttered and there was music implicitin hisname, the Sieg-mund, the victorious voice or utterance. There had been music everywhere in Vienna, there was Beethoven, surcharged and tortured with his sym- phonies, Mozart, frail and impeccable and deserted and early dead. There was Schumann, of course, and Schubert’s name wwas especially associated with the village or suburb of Grin- zing, not far from Dabling where the Professor had his sum- mer-quarters that first year I was in Vienna. There was the city acclaimed by the world as the heart and center of music and music-lovers, And here was the master-musician, he, too, 105+TRIBUTE TO FREUD a son of Apollo, who would harmonize the whole human spirit, who like Orpheus, would charm the very beasts of the unconscious or subconscious mind, and enliven the dead sticks and stones of buried thoughts and memories, 82 “By cHance or intention,’ I began these notes on September 19th, aday sacred to Thoth and later to St. Januarius,a name affiliated with that of the Roman Janus, patron of gate-ways and portals, guardian ofall ‘beginnings.’ I did not consciously select this date, though, as I glance at the calendar from time to time, my subconscious mind might have guided me to it. But by quite definite ‘intention,’ I will finish these ‘begin- nings,’as for November 2nd, the day of the lighting of the can- dies for the souls of the Dead. Thisis the evening of All Hallows, Halloween;so tomorrow is the first of November 1944, All Saints Day. The angel Michael of the old dispensation, thearchangel Michael of the Revelation, is regent ofthe planet stillcalled Mercury. And in Renaissance paintings, we are not surprised to see Saint Michael wearing the winged sandals and sometimes even the winged helmet of the classic messenger of the Gods. But for the Professor, I choose rather the day following All Saints Day. He was more interested in souls than saints. 83 One oF titese souls was called Mignon, though its body did not fit it very well. It was small, mignonne, though it was not +106- WRITING ON THE WALL pretty, they said. It was a girl between two boys; but, ironi- cally, it was wispy and mousy, while the boys were glowing and gold. It was not pretty, they said. Then they said it was pretty — but suddenly, it shot up like a weed. They said, sur- prised, ‘Sheis really very pretty, but isn’t ta pity she’s so tall? ‘The soul was called Mignon, but, clearly, it did not fit its body. ise But it found itself in a song. Only the tune is missing. 84 I THE Last verse of this lyric of Johann Wolfgang Goethe is theline, Es stitrzt der Fels, the rock breaks or falls in ruins, and indeed this is our very present predicament; but und ier ihn die Flut following, gives the impression of a living river; though ‘and Overt th loo isthe Hteal rendering. Ruins and the ood, but there remains our particular Ark or Barque ~ a canoe, I called it - that may, even yet, carry us through the seething channels to safe harbor. The Mignon of Goethe's lyric herself {joins us in our ritual of question and answer. There were the question marks, as I called them, the series of the imperfect, reversed § of the scroll-pattern of the writing-on-the-wall in the Greekisland of Corfu, in thespring of the year 1920. There was the S or the serpent of my original comner-stone, the cenigmaticsymbol that a childhood friend, my first ‘live’ poet, Ezra Pound, translated for me. There was the Sas serpent, ‘companion to the thistle, the symbol that suggests waste +107°TRIBUTE TO FREUD placesand the desert; but we have been told that the desert shall blossom as therose, and it wasin the desert that Moses raised the standard, the old T or Tau-cross of Thoth of the Egyptians. ‘The Professor had been working on a continuation of his “Moses, the Egyptian’ theme, though we had not actually dis- cussed this when I had my ‘real’ dream of the Egyptian Prin- cess. The Professor asked me then if I were the child Miriam who in the Doré picture had stood, half-hidden in the river- reeds, watching over the new-born child who was to become leader of a captive people and founder of a new religion. Mir- iam? Mignon? 85 ‘Sue asks TH question. Each verse ofthe lyricisa question ora series of questions. Do you know the Land? Do you know the House? Do you know the Mountain? Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg? ‘Do you know the mountain and its cloud-bridge?” isan awk- ward enough translation but the idea of mountain and bridge isso very suitable to this whole translation of the Professor and ‘our work together. Steg really means a plank; foot-bridge is the more accurate rendering, It isnot bridge for a great crowd of people, and it isa bridge flung, as it were, across the abyss, not built and hammered and constructed. There is plenty of psy- choanalytic building and constructing; there are the Gods that some people read Goods. We are dealing here with the realm of fantasy and imagination, flung across the abyss, and these ate a poet's lines. The same poet's following lines seem peculiarly appropriate to our subject: +108 WRITING ON THE WALL Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg, “The donkey seeks his way in the mist.’ There are plenty of donkeys who have set foot on the lower, more easily demarked path-ways of this mountain. Too heavily burdened with intellectual equipment or blinded with the blinkers of prej- udice, they go round and round in circles and come back to the stable shaking their heads sadly over their own past folly and the greater folly of the mountain that has so beguiled them. But there are other donkeys who plod on ~ faithful don- keys. They find their prototype in the Christmas manger- scene. ‘And our very Phobia is here and the host of allied Phobias, the Dragon and its swarm of children, the Hydra-headed monster, the subject of another of the twelve labors of Hercules. InHihlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brat, the old dragon-brood ~ or the ancient brood of the Dragon ~ livesin the caves. Like the Christian of the Puritan poet, John Bunyan, we must push on, through and past these perils. Kennst di ihn wohl? Do you actually know this and all these things? If anyone ever did, itis the old Professor. And it was finally St. Michael - wasn’t it? ~ who cast out that aboriginal old Beast? Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, and last Michael, Cap- tain or Centurion of the hosts of heaven. But itis with thesoul rather than with saintsand angels that we are concerned; Miriam or Mignon, we may call her. Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blithn? “Do you know the land where the orange-tree blossoms?” It ‘was on a winter day that the Professor handed me a branch from an orange-tree with dark laurel-like leaves, +109°TRIBUTE TO FREUD Imdunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glithn, Against the dark leaves is that glow of orange-gold. Ein sanfter Wind vor blaven Himmel weht; Yes, it was dark and cold and there was the rumbling of war- chariots from the near horizon. But upon the old Professor and this particularsoul, asoft wind blew from acloudlesssky so gentle was the wind that the myrtle, that with the rose is sacred to Love, did not flutter a leaf, and the laurel grew very tall there. Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht. Icisall there; the lyrical interrogation and the implication that the answer is given with it. It is: do you know the Land - but you do know it, don’t you? The House? The Mountain? It isa strange land, a foreign land, a land of classic associations, the myrtleof Aphrodite and the laurel of Apollo. Youdo know the House, don’t you? The roof of the house stood on pillars, like the vriginal roof or part-roof of the temple of Karnak or the Parthenon of Athens. But this house seems nearer in time; thereis the great entrance room or Saal with its glowing lamps and candles, and beyond it is the brightly tapestried or painted inner room or rooms, the Gemach or apartment. It is there that we find the statues, the Marmorbilder, even as | had found the little images in the room beyond the actual consult- ing room, on the Professor's table. The statues stare and stare and seem tosay, what has happened to you? Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan? Poor child, poor shivering and unprotected soul. But ~ you do know it? - but of course you do. Iwant to go there with you, O my Guardian (O my Protector), 110+ WRITING ON THE WALL mit dir, omein Beschitzer, ziehn. ‘Theland or country, the house, the mountain -we may rest in the garden, we may be sheltered within that house; it is so beautiful; it makes me think of the Cad’Oro, the Golden House on the Grand Canal in Venice. Itis the domus aurea of the Lau- rentian litany, and the whole poem in its symbolism follows the cycle of the soul’s progress. The garden, the house o hall, the mountain. The mountain is very high for it iscrowned like Olympus with clouds, but there is the Wolkensteg, the cloud- bridge or foot-way. It is not a very wide bridge, the chasms or sgulfs where the ancient dragon lives are deep and terrifying, (But ive have tunneledvery deep, said the old Professor.) Scattered rocks and ruins lie about us and the threatening roar of the cataract is still echoing in our ears. But you, of all people, knowit, don’t you, the inquiring soul asks; while the plodding little donkey continues its way in the mist. O, let’s go away together, pleads the soul, the Mignon of the poet Goethe; let’s go, O my dearest, she says first, mein Gelicbte, then O my guardian, my protector, omein Beschitzer, and in the end, she does not ask if she may go} or exclaim, if only we could go; but there is the simple affirmation, with the white roses - or the still whiter gardenias, as it happened - of uttermost veneration. Dakin! Dahin Gehtunser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn! London September 19, 1944 November 2, 1944 “tideADVENTADVENT Marci 2, 1933 I crip TOO HARD . .. went to the old wooden restaurant with the paintings, like the pictures that my mother did, Swiss scenes, mountains, chalet halfway up a hill, torrent under a bridge. As in her sequence, there were several mid-Victorian snow-scenes here, too. The old plates of the saw-mills, the Lehigh River, summer-house with trellis, deer-park of the Seminary where her father was principal for many years, sug- gest some near-affiliation with these weathered oils. There are a few still-life studies, apples with a brown jug and the usual bunched full double-peonies with astalk of blue delphinium, suchas we seein the Galleries, but these pictures are homely or home-y, of no intrinsic value. ‘My mother and I visited an Austrian village, like these pic- tures; it wasin the early summerof 1913after wehad left Italy. ‘My father had returned to America, he said, ‘to buy a pair of shoes.’ There was. Passion Play; Iremember my mother talk- ing on a wooden bridge to one of the village women who said ‘Judas was the fish-man, My mother spoke perfect German. ‘We stayed at an inn; all I rememberis the waitress calling me a backgfisch and our delight in framed color-prints of the old ‘Austrian emperor and the empress in blue décolleté with pearls. That was probably Innsbruck. The village - I don’t remember its name - took the visitors into their own homes, ‘wooden cottages or chalets (like these in the weathered paint- ings), and there was a rather overwhelming feeling of the wood-carved Christ at corners of the village and at the ent- ance to the old bridge. +115:TRIBUTE TO FREUD Iwandered alone across the bridge but did not get far. The forest seemed menacing, At Christmas time, we had deer on the moss under the tree. Our grandfather made us clay sheep. Ieried too hard . .. [do not know what I remembered: the hurt of the cold, nun-like nursesat the time of my first London, confinement, spring 1915; the shock of the Lusitania going down just before the child was still-born; fear of drowning; young men on park benches in blue hospital uniform; my father’s anti-war sentiments and his violent volte face in 1918; my broken marriage; a short period with friends in Cornwall in 1918; my father’s telescope, my grandfather's microscope. If let go ([, this one drop, this one ego under the microscope telescope of Sigmund Freud) I fear to be dissolved utterly, Thad what Bryher called the ‘jelly-fish’ experience of double ego; bell-jar or half-globe as of transparent glass spread over my head like a diving-bell and another mani- fested from my feet, so enclosed I was for a short space in St. Mary’s, Scilly Isles, July 1918, immunized or insulated from the war disaster. But I could not stay in it; I re-materialized and Bryher took me to Greece in the spring of 1920. My older brother and I took our father’s magnifying glass, and he showed me how to ‘burn paper.’ Our father stopped us, ashe found it dangerous, ‘playing with fire” When I told Professor Freud I was marrie. ‘Ah, twenty yearsago.’ Sigmund Freud is like a curator ina museum, surrounded by his priceless collection of Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese treasures; he is ‘Lazarus stand forth’; he is like D. H. Law- rence, grown old but matured and with astute perception. His hands are sensitive and frail. He is midwife to the soul. He is himself the soul. Thought of him bashes across my forehead, like a death-head moth; he is not the sphinx but the sphinx- moth, the death-head moth, 1913, he said, “116° ADVENT Nowonder Iam frightened. Iet death in at the window. IfT do not let ice-thin window-glass intellect protect my soul or my emotion, Ilet death in, But perhaps I will be treated with a psychic drug, will take away a nameless precious phial from hiscavern. Perhaps will learn the secret, be priestess with power over life and death. He beat on my pillow or the head-piece of the old couch Iie on, He was annoyed with me. His small chow, Yofi sits at his feet. We make an ancient cycle or circle, wise-man, woman, lioness (as he calls his chow)! He isa Jew; like the last Prophet, he would break down the old law of Levi jeath by stoning for the vagrant, and unimaginable punishment for the lawless, The old Victorian law is hard; Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud tempered it for my generation. Kenneth Macpherson called me ‘recording angel.’ I will endeavor to record the graih in the painted apple, in the painted basket, hanging to the left of the wooden dresser, directly in line with my eyes, as I glance up from my note- book. The painting is dimmed by smoke and winter damp, but there must be black seeds in the painted apples, there must be white wine in the painted jug. I wanted to paint like ‘my mother, though she laughed at her pictures weadmired so. My father went out of doors; the stars commanded him. Human souls command Sigmund Freud. In Corfu, spring 1920, among my many fantasies, I imag- ined a figure came in sack-cloth; he was not in appearance the conventional Messiah, though his words made me think he ‘was Christ. Hesaid, ‘You were once kind to one of my people.” To whom wasI kind? “There was a Russian-American Jew, John Cournos or Ivan Ivanovitch Korshun, as he said his name was. I don’t think Korshun is the right spelling, but he pronounced it like that and as I remember, he said Korshun meant a hawk. “7sTRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘There was another, a Mr. Brashaer, a famous lehs-maker who fitted the lenses to my father’s Zenith telescope. Was this the lens I imagined in the Scilly Isles, or the two convex lenses that I called bell-jars? Tcame back from Aegina, from the Hellenic Cruise trip of spring 1932, My daughter waswith me; she wasjust thirteen. 1 came back from Egypt, 1923, at the time of the Tutankhamen ‘excavations; I came back from the Ionian Islands in 1920. I saw the world through my double-lens; it seemed every- thing had broken but that. I watched snowflakes through a magnified pane of glass, ‘Who was this that I had been kind to? Mr. Brashaer was small, dark, vivid, He was a famous lens-maker, the most famousin America, perhaps the most famousin the world. He issmall in my imagination, this person waskind to. Isthis the ‘magic homunculus ofthe alchemists? 2 FREUD T00K ME into the otherroom and showed me the things on his table. He took the ivory Vishnu with the upright ser- pentsand canopy of snake heads, and put it intomy hands. He selected a tiny Athené from near the end of the semicircle, he said, ‘This is my favorite.’ The Vishnu was set in the center with the statues arranged cither side; there isan engraving of the Professor somewhere, seated at this desk behind or within the circle. He opened the case against the wall and displayed his treasures, antique rings. ‘We spoke of fees? he said, ‘Do not worry about that, that is, my concern.’ He wenton, ‘I want you tofeel at home.’ Then he said he thought my voice was ‘delicate’ and added, as ifthere s118- ADVENT might be danger of my letting outside matters intrude, ‘Lam, after all, seventy-seven.’ Tfound Iwas not soshy. I told him of Miss Chadwick and of how [had suffered, during my preliminary sessions with her, spring 1931. I would deliberately assemble all the sorry memories in my effort to get at the truth. He said, ‘We never know what is important or what is unimportant until after.” He said, ‘We must be impartial, see fair play to ourselves.” told him how the first impression of his room had over- whelmed and upset me. I had not expected to find him sur- rounded by these treasures, in a museum, a temple. We talked of Egypt. I spoke of the yellow sand, the blue sky, the beetle- scarabs. Then I said that Egypt was a series of living Bible illustrationsand I told him of my delight in our Gustave Doré, asachild. a Hesaid how fortunate I had been todiscover reality ‘super- imposed’ (his word) on the pictures. Thad told him in my last sessions of the Princess and the baby in the basket. Heasked me again if was Miriam orsaw Miriam, and did I think the Princess was actually my mother? He said a dream sometimes showed a ‘comer,’ but I argued that this dream wasa finality, an absolute, ora synthesis. Nor was I, as he had suggested in the first instance, the baby, the founder of a new religion.’ Obviously it was he, who was that light out of Egypt. But it is true that we play puss-in-a-corner, find one angle and another or sce things from different corners or sides of a room, Yes, we play hide-and-seek, hunt-the-slipper, and hunt-the-thimble and patiently and meticulously patch together odds and ends of our picture-puzzle. We spell words upside down and backward and crosswise, for our crossword puzzle, and then again we run away and hide in the cellar or +119‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD the attic or in’our mother’s clothes-closet. We play magnifi- cent charades, But the Professor insisted I myself wanted to be Moses; not only did I want to be a boy but wanted to be a hero. He sug- gested my reading Otto Rank’s Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden MARCH 3, FRIDAY Remembering Vishnu, I think the ivory is like a half-lily I do not know if the white lily was a fantasy, dream, or reality. I stood looking through the iron railing of the garden, sur- rounded by a crowd of small boys of assorted ages, brothers no doubt, smaller cousins and the neighboring bandits. A very old, tall old man is wandering in the garden. With him, there is a younger edition of himself, but the tall young ‘mans the gardener. ‘The grandfather, godfather, god-the-father sees the chil- dren, He summons them to the iron fence. He looks them over. But only one is chosen. ‘The very small girl staggers forward, overcome, shy yet bold, She crosses the threshold. Shestandson the garden path. Itisa‘real’ garden, with sandy path like our grandfather's gar- den; itis shut in, however; it is not a very large garden, it is more like a long unroofed room between the house walls. ‘There are trees in the garden, ordinary trees, real trees. She can only distinguish trees at this time by their fruit or blossom, But these are ordinary trees, in the ordinary time of summer-leaf. ‘The old gentleman says that she must choose what she wants. Actually, there isno pansy border to‘pick’ from and no fruit on the trees, But she must choose what she wants. Shesees whatshe wants. Isit the only flower in this garden? Itisnota lowershe would have chosen, forshe would never +120° have been allowed to choose it. It is an Easter-lily or Madonna-lily, growing by the path, ‘She points to it, overwhelmed by her audacity. ‘The gardener unclaspsa knife, cuts off the flower for her. But thisisrather overwhelming; what does one do with one huge Easter-lily? She races down the now empty street totheir front door on Church Street. ‘She rushes into their front sitting room or parlor. It seems emptier than usual, with light falling from the apparently uncurtained windows. There is mama sewing, there is mamalie sewing My Easter-i ‘Ah, says mama or says mamalie (our grandmother), ‘that will look beautiful on your grandfather's new grave.” She is alone at Nisky Hill, where her grandfather has recently been buried. There is just this one mound, like a flower-bed. She ‘plants’ the lily. Obviously, this is my inheritafice. I derive my imaginative faculties through my musician-artist mother, through her part-Celtic mother, through the grandfather of English and middle-European extraction. My father was pure New England, a one-remove pioneer to Indiana, who returned “back east.’ My father is here too, but dissolved or resolved into the ‘other grandfather,’ whom we had never known. My mother's father was the first ‘dead’ person I had ever known. I donot at the time actually associate the godfather or god-the- father with a recognizable personality. He is a stranger. He is General from the Old South. [ater askmy mother where he hhas gone? But there is no such person, no General from the Old South, no such house with a narrow walled-in garden, she says,on Church Street. Sheknows everyone on Church Street. I do not accept this, but I cannot not find the house, oppo- site what had been the College; they are tearing down the Col- lege and putting up new buildings but anyhow, the old 12.‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD sgodfather’s house was the other side of the street. It does not quite work out, butitis only afterwards, long afterwards, that find this out ‘The trees were very leafy. He gives me an Easter-lily. Eas- ter-lilies come at Easter time, spring or early spring; the trees are summer trees in full leaf, But worse than that. It was after he gave her the lily, only a day or two later, that he sends his sleigh. Itisa beautiful sleigh with sleigh-bells. The gardener is the coachman. There is a thick fur rug. We drive across the untrodden snow; there is no one in the streets. He sent a message with the coachman, He said he had sent the sleigh because of the little girl. "When will he come again?” Task my mother. Is it winter, summer? ‘Why ~ what?” “The sleigh, of course, he said he would send it whenever I wanted, itis for youand me and Gilbert and Harold, but he said it was because of me that we could all ride in his sleigh.’ We were all tucked up together under the fur rug. But no one had sent us asleigh, my mother told me. ‘Anyhow, the seasonsare all wrong. In Corfu, someone placed two white lilies and one red tulip on my table. Bryher probably. But there seemed mystery about it. Idid not ask Bryher about it. I had learned long ago not to inquire too deeply into the mystery. ‘The ivory Vishnu sits upright in his snake-hood, like the piston of acalla-lily, ora jack-in-the-pulpit. My grandfather was the jack-in-the-pulpit, a pastor or clergyman Church Street was our street, the Church was our Church, It was founded by Count Zinzendorf who named our town Bethlehem. People tell one things, and other children laugh at one’s ignorance. ‘But Jesus was not born here.” ‘That may be true. We will not discuss the matter. Only +122 ADVENT after some forty years, we approach it. ‘I don’t know if T dreamed this or if I just imagined it, or flater imagined that T dreamed it? ‘It does not matter,” he said, ‘whether you dreamed it or imagined it or whether you just made it up, this moment, I do not think you would deliberately falsify your findings. The important thing is that it shows the trend of your fantasy or imagination.” ; He goes on, "You were born in Bethlehem? It is inevitable that the Christian myth ~’ He paused. ‘This does not offend you?” ‘Offend me?’ ‘My speaking of your religion in terms of myth, hesaid, Isaid, ‘How could I be offended?” Bethlehem isthe town of Mary," he said. MaRcH 4 Iwascoup and I found difficulty in starting. I went on talking about the Doré pictures, the dead baby in the Judgment of Solo- ‘mon. 1 told him of the graves of my two sisters. I had never known these sisters; one was a half-sister and really belonged tothe twogrown half-brothers, Ericand Alfred. Their mother was there too. We went on with the lily-fantasy. The old man ‘was obviously, he said, God. “The lily was the Annunciation-ily. I said it was the ivory Vishnu that had prompted me to tell the anecdote. He asked meabout my early religious background, [said it was not that they were strict, we were not often punished. I remembered, however, terrible compulsions or premonitions of punish ‘ment. Hell from the Bible stories seemed a real place. But I did not speak of this. I went on to tell him of our Christmas candles. +123-TRIBUTE TO FREUD ‘An atmosphere .. "he said. He said, “There isno more significant symbol than a lighted candle. Yousay you remember your grandfather's Christmas- Eve service? The girls as well as the boys had candles?” It seemed odd that he should ask this. Sigmund Freud got up from his chair at the back of the couch, and came and stood beside me. He said, ‘Ifevery child had a lighted candle given, as you say they were given at your grandfather's Christmas Eve service, by the grace of God, we would have no more problems. ... That is the true heart of all religion.’ Laterat home, in bed, Iwas stricken and frightened, thinking of all the things that I wanted or rather felt impelled to tell him. I think of Sigmund Freud as this little-papa, Papalic, the grandfather. Talking half-asleep to myself, or rather to the Professor, I realize I am using the rhythm or language I use only for cats and children, There is my daughter's cat, Peter, that, she tells me, ‘Ihave left to you in my will.” ‘Ie’san old, old cat,’ Isay, talking to the Professor, and then it occurs to me that the jerk of his elbow as he orders or sum- mons me from his waiting room to the consulting room is like the angular flap of a bird-wing. I have lately been watching these great crows or rooks here in the gardens off the Ringstrasse. Yes, there is a singular finality about his least remark, his ‘most insignificant gesture. There is the Pallas Athené on his desk, beyond the double door, leading from the consulting room to the innersanctum. Just above my chamber door that was a bust of Pallas, if am not mistaken, from Poe's Raven. There isa quoth-the-Raven mystery about his every utterance, though he seems to huddle rather than to perch, more like an old ow, hibou sacré, in the corner back of the couch. 124 ADVENT Iremembera special gift from my father: this time the giftis not from little-papa, Papalie. The wretched and fascinating creature stared andstared at me, from the top of his bookshelf. ‘The bookshelf ran the length of the wall opposite his table, or rather there were bookcases along all the walls that were not broken by windows. I must have been indeed the child of heroes and a hero from Geburt des Helden, for Tasked him, “May Thave that white owl?” It was an extremely large owl. It was very white. It lived under a bell-jar, it had large unblinking gold or amber eyes. I was suddenly reminded of the golden fur of the little Yor lion- css, If my grandfather gave me a lighted candle, my father gave me asnow-owl, ‘True, there was a qualification about this miracle, as there so often is in a true fairy tale. Yes, the owl was mine; it was mine for ever, he would not ask me to give it back to him. He had reproved one of us one day for being an ‘Indian-giver.” Someone rashly gave away a bag of marbles, a cock-a-doodle- do trumpet (a rooster of papier maché whose head was like a Halloween false-face), or Joey from the Punch and Judy. ‘Though individually the dolls were divided, the ‘show’ was common property. There was.asnag about some gift."What is an Indian-giver?” ‘Itis someone who gives something and asks forit back again.’ But he wasn’t an Indian-giver. I could keep the snow-owl. ‘There was, however, this condition, Ihad told the Professor of the snow-owl. I told him there was one condition, and paused as ifto emphasize the drama. But perhaps it isan old trick ‘The Professor said before had time to tell him, ‘Ah - yes ~ he gave the ow! to you, on the condition that it stayed where it But as I lie here, in my comfortable bed, in the Hotel 1125+TRIBUTE TO FREUD Regina, I goon with my reverie. Iam not preparing for tomor- row’ssession, Iam simply going on with today’s. By somecuri- ous freak of luck, a gardener brought me the tip of a cactus plant, to plant in a flower pot, in pebbles and sand. ‘Do not water it, it will grow best, right out in the sun; I have a huge plant, a tree really,’ he told me. The gardener explained that he had grown his cactus tree from a slip just like the one he brought me. I was proud of my cactus plant and moved it about in the sun, It would grow into a tree. Itreally wasn’t fai My three-inch strip of tough cactus fiber began to glow, it did not grow, it simply burst into a huge flower. It was like a red water-lily. Its petals were smooth and cold, though they should have been blazing. Well, perhaps they were. I thought the gardener would be so pleased. He said, ‘I have had my plant now for years and not a sign of blossom.” Tewasn’t fair. ‘There was no rivalry about the butterfly, but that wasn’t fair either. For some reason, this giant worm had chosen a rather fragile stalk from my garden plot to build on. It may have been that the packets ofour ‘cheap seeds’ had been badly ted or assorted and that some strange exotic had got in amongthem. Buthow did the worm get there? There was only one of the nicotiana plants. Ibroke off thestem and putit with what tobacco-flower leaves were left and placed the cocoon where I felt it would be safest, on the top of my father’s book- case. The owl was one end, the other end was the Indian skull, at least we called it an Indian skull. It had been dug up or plowed up by him orby hisfather when ourfather wasa boyin Indiana. Tknow that I am in bed in the Regina Hotel, Freiheitsplatz, Vienna, I know that it is March 4, 1933. Tam not sure but I think that this is iny father’s birthday. He never wanted a ‘birthday’ in our house, that seemed every other week to mark +126 ADVENT. some festivity in mama’s or Mamalie’sBirthday Book or Text Book. I think this is my father’s birthday. He was younger than the Professor when he died, so perhaps it is natural, one way and another, to give the Professor the role of grand- or great-father, for all he is little-father or Papalie. IfT tell the Professor about the cactus and the butterfly, he will think I have made up one or the other, or both. ‘As I say, it was not quite fair, for had had some slight con- verse with amateur experts, though I myself knew the name of not one butterfly. The thing that hatched out was a moth. It was exotic and enormous. It was literally the size of a not-so- small bird. It crawled or fluttered the length of the top shelf and settled on the Indian skull that my father or my grand- father had dug or plowed up when my father was a boy in Indiana, My father and I agreed there was nothing to be done about it but toopen the window and hope that it would fly out. ‘There isa bed-lamp, on the stand at my elbow. There is, remember, a flattering soft-rose lamp-shade. If switch on the light, I will sce the length of green curtains, the comfortable green-upholstered arm-chair, glass-topped dressing-table, and the ordinary table with my books and papers. Twill have to switch on the light soon, for my eyes, staring into darkness, wonder if again I crossed the threshold. No, 1 fam sure about the cactus. I am not quite sure about the butterfly. I was wrong about the butterfly. I did not break off'a heavy cocoon, but I gathered the enormous green caterpillar with the tobacco-flower stalk and placed the stalk and worm in a cardboard box. Did Icut holes in the box? There was ventila- tion somewhere. This was my own worm. In the box, among the fresh green tobacco leaves, and the old brown tobacco leaves, he wove his huge cocoon. 127°TRIBUTE TO FREUD How did he get out of the box? Did I hear him scratching? Did he flutter and beat his wings against the box? How did I get the cardboard box onto the top of the tall bookcase? Did I climb up on a chair? I was not tall enough to reach the top shelf, even with a chair. DidI makeitall up? Did Idream it? And if dreamt it, did I dream it forty years ago, or did I dream it last night? It was the huge green caterpillar that I gathered with the blossoming nicotiana. Tam wrong about my father’s birthday, My father’s bi day isin November. Why did I say today, March 4th, is my father’s birthday? he 4 Himou saceé! Tasked him how he wasand he smiled acharm- ing, wrinkled smile that reminded me of D. H. Lawrence. He told me (in French) how Napoleon’s mother used tosay, even at the height ofhis fame, “That is all right as long asit lasts.’ spoke ofthe last war-year. He said he had reason to remember the epidemic, ashe lost hi favorite daughter. ‘She is here,’ he said, and he showed me a tiny locket that he wore, fastened to his watch-chain, She had died of the epidemic in Hamburg, though the baby she had just had survived. [remembered Dr. Sachs speaking of this gil, the beautiful Sophie. So the beautiful Sophie died, having her child about the same time as I was having mine, early spring 1919. Ihad the same Spanish influenza and though it was common knowl edge that in no instance did both child and mother live after the depletion of pneumonia, yet I was the miraculous exception. It was not the child nor my critical physical condi- tion that caused the final collapse +128 ADVENT But there was so much to tell. I dodged the actual details of my desolation and told the Professor how kind Havelock Ellis had been to me when I saw him in his latin Brixton, those few times before the birth of my child. I had written to Dr. Ellis, although Daphne Bax who had arranged for me to stay in a cottage near her in Buckinghamshire, during the winter of 1919, had tried to discourage any idea of my meeting Have- lock Ellis whom I so greatly admired. Mrs. Ellis had had a house at one time in Buckinghamshire, near Daphne. Daphne said, ‘Oh, Havelock ~ no one ever manages to meet Havelock. He is remote, apart, arecluse,a Titan,a giant.’ Per- haps Daphne's so taking things for granted spurred me to approach this Titan. I received a courteous note in answer to my letter to him, and the next time I made the trip from Princes Risborough to London, I went to see this Titan. He served China tea, with a plate of salted pecans and peanuts, ‘There was an unexpected charm and authenticity in hisartist décor. He wore a brown velvet smoking-jacket and showed me some of his treasures, a Buddha that his father, a sea cap- tain, had brought back from China, a copy ofa famous bust of himself done by - I forget who. There were various auto- graphed photographs of people I had never met but heard of; Walt Whitman among others looked down from the wall. ‘There were Russian cigarettes and Dr. Ellis served lemon, in the Russian or American manner, with the tea. Iwenton talk: ing to the Professor ofthe effect that Dr. Ellishad on me; Thad expected to meet the rather remote, detached, and much- abused scientist, I found the artist. Sigmund Freud said, ‘Ah, you tell thisall so beautifully. Dr. Ellis was in my fantasies when I went, July 1919, with Bryher to the Scilly Isles. He knew Cornwall and had lived there off and on, for many years in ‘retreat’ as Daphne would have said, working on his famous volumes. The Scilly Isles, in the flow of the Gulf Stream, suggested the Mediterranean +129‘TRIBUTE TO FREUD tome. There were great birds; they perched there in “retreat,” at certain seasons, both from the tropic zones and from the Arctic. It was here at this time Ihad my ‘elly-fish’ experience, as Bryher called it, There were palm-trees, coral-plants, mesambeanthum, opened like water-lilies the length of the grey walls; the sort of fibrous under-water leaf and these open sea-flowers gave one the impression of being submerged. We were in the little room that Bryher had taken for our study when [felt this impulse to ‘let go" into a sort of balloon, or diving-bell, as I have explained it, that seemed to hover over me. There was an old-fashioned sideboard and I remem- ber thinking, ‘I must really ask for another jar to put those flowersin.’ They had stuck a great bundle of calla-lilies, wed- ged tight into a jam pot. Two or three of the flower-stalks would have been more effective, with a few of the spear-like leaves. There was an engraving of the inevitable Landscer’s ‘Stag at Bay over the fireplace, screened now with a ruffle or fan of red paper. When I tried to explain this to Bryher and told herit might be something sinister or dangerous, she said, ‘No, no, itisthe most wonderful thingleverheard of. Let itcome.’ I tried to write a rough account of this singular adventure, Noteson Thought and Vision, There was, lexplained to Bryher, a second globe or bell-jar rising as ifit were from my feet. T was enclosed. I felt Iwas safe but secing things as through water. I felt the double globe come and go and I could have dismissed itat once and probably would have if I had been alone. But it would not have happened, I imagine, if [had been alone. It was being with Bryher that projected the fantasy, and all the time] was thinking that this would bean interesting bit of psy- chological data for Dr. Havelock Ellis. When I returned to London, I sent my Notes to Dr. Ellis. I thought he would be so interested. But he appeared unsym- Pathetic, or else he did not understand or else he may have thought it was a danger signal. +130° Dr. Ellis did not understand but the Professor understood perfectly. AsI was leaving, the Professor asked me, ‘Are you lonely?’ I said, ‘Oh no.” No, Iwasnot lonely. There were museums, galleries, the walks in the Stadpart, visiting old churches. I scribbled in my note- ‘book, and leafed over magazines and bookssent me from Lon- don and America. It did not occur to me, until I was back in mybed, that I had omitted to tell the Professor thestory of the caterpillar that had so concerned me last night before falling tosleep. Now, I must assemble the picture again. Where had I left off? There was some snag somewhere. ‘There were, now I recalled, several snags. To begin with, Thad got my father’s birthday all wrong. Why substitute March for November, but the four was right; yes, I was certain that November 4 was my father’s birthday. ‘That caterpillar? No, it would not scratch and beat with its ‘wings inside the box, for surely when it had woven its shell, 1 would have left the box-lid off altogether. Why this box and box-lid? There is that rather gruesome old print in the Profes- sor’s waiting room, called ‘Buried Alive.” I must have taken fresh leaves one day and found the spun sheath. But how long did it take a caterpillar to weave its elaborate vestment? Why did I forget the caterpillar? Why did I remember it? There it ison my table, that last volume that I disliked so. It was sent to me from London, another fanatical woman writ- ing her story of D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence? It was in March he died. ‘Then I substituted my father’s birthday for the death-day of. H. Lawrence. “131sTRIBUTE TO FREUD 5 Maren 5 I ap satp, in the beginning, that I only wanted to tell the story, it was like the Ancient Mariner, but he did not know or pretended not to know the poem, I had connected the Ancient Mariner with the Bible as an uncle had a Doré illustrated edi- tion that we laid flat on the floor, in my grandmother's house, aswe did at home our own illustrated Bible, before we could read. I connect Poe and Coleridge in my sequence, as they were both alleged drug-addicts, Poe with his Lenores and haunted Ushers, and Coleridge with his Xanadu, his Kubla Khan. I was publicly reproved at Miss Gordon’s school in West Philadelphia, when I was fifteen, because I firmly stated that Edgar Allan Poe was my favorite among American writers. I was told by Miss Pitcher who had otherwise encour- aged me, even at that age, in my literary aspirations, that Poe was not a good influence, he was ‘unwholesome, morbid.” Today, lying on the famous psychoanalytical couch, Ihave afeeling of evaporatingcold menthol, someform ofether, laid on my ‘morbid’ brow. Wherever my fantasies may take me now, I have a center, security, aim, I am centralized or re- oriented herein this mysterious lion’s den or Aladdin’s cave of treasures. 1am salvaged, saved; ship-wrecked like the Mariner, [have sensed bell-notes from the hermit’s chapel. There is Baude- laire too and his Fleurs du Mal, but there is no evil in Sigmund Freud, Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange, I whisper under my breath, in one of those preg- nant pauses, while the fumes of the aromatic cigar waft above me, from the nook in the corner behind my head. +132 ADVENT ‘Are we psychic coral-polyps? Do we build one upon another? Did I (sub-aqueous) in the Scilly Isles, put out a feeler? Did I die in my polyp manifestation and will Ileave a polyp skeleton of coral to blend with this entire myriad- minded coral chaplet orentire coral island? My psychicexpe- ences were sub-aqueous. mst remember to ell Sigmund Freud of Norman Doug- las’ epigram on Havelock Ellis, “He is a man with one eye in ecountry of the blind.” ms donot want to talk today. Tam drifting out to sea. But know I am safe, can return at any moment to terra firma. Yes, there was a dream last night but the ramifications are too elaborate. I dreamt I sent my book Hedylus to Peter Van Eck, whom I met on the boat going to Athens, spring 1920. I will have to tell him about the book, Hedylus the Alexandrian poct who is mentioned in the Garland of Meleager, and Hedyle his mother. | Iwill have to tell him that Bryher came into thisdream, dis- guised at a Halloween party, as a black cat, actually as Peter whom my daughter says she has left me in her will. Puss-in- boots? No, I could not tell him about Hedylus. What had I told him? I had not told him of the caterpillar, that iscertain. Iwas annoyed with that last book on Lawrence, but it gave me that date. It was March 2nd, not far removed from 4, and 2x 2is4, and will we ever lay a four-square foundation? Why lay a foundation? Iwasn’t fair but I could hardly cope with hisenormous nov- cls. They didn’t seem to ring true. That is, I was not suscep- tible to the frenzy in them. In them? Or in the choros of Maenids? I do not like that last book. I have not liked any of these books that have come out since his death. What do they know of Lawrence? +133TRIBUTE TO FREUD I should talk to the Professor about Lawrence, but I was particularly annoyed by his supercilious references to psycho- analysis and, by implication or inference, to the Professor himself. The Man Who Died? I don’t remember it, I don’t think of it. Only it was a re- statement of his philosophy, but it came too late. Idon’t mean that. Thave carefully avoided coming to terms with Lawrence, the Lawrence of Women in Love and Lady Chatterley. But there was this last Lawrence. Hedid notaccept Sigmund Freud, orimplied itin hisessay. Idon’t want to think of Lawrence. ‘Thope never to see you again,’ he wrote in that last letter. ‘Then after the death of Lawrence, Stephen Guest brought me the book and said, ‘Lawrence wrote this for you.’ Lawrence was imprisoned in his tomb; like the print hang- ing in the waiting room, he was ‘Buried Alive.’ Weare all buried alive. ‘The story comes back automatically when I switch off the bed-lamp. Ido not seem to be able to face the story in the daytime. Yes, it was abomination, could see it writhing. ‘It’s only a caterpillar.’ Perhaps I cannot really talk yet. Iam seated at one remove from a doll-chair, on the porch. I look down the wide wooden steps. There is the grapevine, as we called it, and leaf-shadows. They are crouched under the grape arbor. Ican scream, Ican cry. Itisnota thing that the mind could possibly assimilate. They are putting salt on the caterpillar and it writhes, huge likean object seen undera microscope, or loom- ing up itis later film-abstraction. No, how can I talk about the crucified Worm? I have been, leafing over papersin thecafé, there are fresh atrocity stories. I +134 ADVENT cannot talk about the thing that actually concerns me, I can- not talk to Sigmund Freud in Vienna, 1933, about Jewish atrocities in Berlin. MARCH 6, MONDAY Idream Joan and Dorothy are arguing. Joan possesses herself of some boxes and jewel-cases of mine: she treates my dream treasures as common property, spreads them out ona table. I am angry at her casual appropriation of my personal belong- ings. I take up one red-velvet-lined box (actually Bryher had got this for me in Florence) and say passionately, ‘Can you understand nothing?” Joan is a tall girl, we stand level, chal- lenging each other. Tsay, ‘Can't you understand? My mother gave me this box.’I press thisred-velvet-lined red-leather Flo- rentine box against my heart. Actually, physically, my heart is surcharged and beating wildly at the vehemence of my passion. Irecall the Phoenix symbol of D, H. Lawrence and of how I had thought of the Professor as an owl, hawk, or sphinx-moth. ‘Are these substitutions for the scripture hen gathering her chicks? My daughter was born the last day of March with daffodils that come before the swallow dares out of The Winter’s Tale.Richard had brought me many daffodils, that English Lent-lly, Thave been reading James Jeans’s Stars in Their Courses, and am reminded of my bitter disappointment when a well- meaning young uncle called me to the nursery window. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘thereis the Bear in thesky.’ I blinked from the frosty winter-window. [had been shown the frost-flowers, like stars, inkindergarten. That satisfied me, But here was another wonder. I gazed and blinked but there was no Bear to be seen. When I told this to Dr. Sachs, he said, ‘Such a small child would hardly register such a disappointment.’ Perhaps I 1135+TRIBUTE TO FREUD explained it badly. I was shocked that my uncle should deceive me. Surely, a small child would feel the hurt, or the practical joke, feel that a grown-up was playing some trick. I don’t know what sort of a Bear I expected to find there, but a white bear, a polar-bear, a snow-bear might not be impos- sible, as there was (and I knew that) Santa Claus with hisrein- deer who sped over the roofs of our town on Christmas Eve. We did not see him, of course, for he liked to give us our presents secretly. But the uncle assured me that the Bear was there and he would show me a picture of it. The Professor has found mea thick rug now, for the couch. Healwaysseems interested when Itell him of my animal find- ings and fairy-tale associations. At least, it was not my father who deceived me. The Professor said I had not made the con- ventional transference from mother to father, as is usual with agirl at adolescence. He said he thought my father was a cold But our father took us out one evening in the snow and bought us a box of animals. He divided them afterwards, as wehad done with the Punch and Judy dolls. There seemed no friction among the three of us, as to the choice of dolls or later ofthe animals, My older brother took theelephant of course, I had the elk, the small boy had the polar-bear. I should have liked the bear but we had first choice in order of age, then sec- ond choice. Idon't remember what our second and our third choice was. ‘The big boy of course took Punch and I had Judy and the little boy loved Joey. That wasall right. Then Gilbert took the policeman of course, I had the beadle, the little boy had ~ surely there was another doll, I know it worked out. I can’t remember the sixth doll - or did we compromise and give him Toby the dog? ‘The Professor had first written me thathe would be ready to +136- ADVENT see me ‘next year, January or February.’ Thisis next year, but we decided to wait, as he said he feared the ‘polar-bear weather’ might upset me. I remember writing him that I wanted to come in March, whatever the weather might be. Yes - it wasin London in March that I heard from America of the death of my father, though he must have died in February. ‘My mother died too in March but eight years later. The word reached me at Riant Chateau, Territet, where she had been with us, on the first day of spring, 1927. Again, I feel, lying on this couch that a sort of phosphores- cence is evaporating from my forehead and I can almost breathe this anodyne, this ether. Am I reminded of happy release from pain and the fortu- nate auspices, predicted for my daughter who arrived in the vernal equinox, and at the high tide of the sun, at noon exactly? Surely the high tide of her stars brought fortune to me. Some of these things I touched on with the Professor. Ieannot classify the living content of our talks together by recounting, them ina logical or textbook manner. It was, ashe had said of my grandfather, ‘an atmosphere. ...” "don't know why Ipick on Joan and Dorothy, two devoted friends in London. That is, they are devoted to each other; I am really only an acquaintance. Do I associate them with my aunts? Poor Aunt Laura was so happy when my mother told her, when she visited usin Switzerland, that she could haveall her clothes. Joan and Dorothy are substitutes, rivals for my mother’s love. It does not matter who they are. We were together in Florence, too. My modest jewels are precious to me, for their association, a string of smoke-sapphires or star- sapphires and a bracelet (from a shop where at one time Cel- lini had been master silversmith), some leather frames and “137+TRIBUTE TO FREUD old paperbacked Tauchnitz editions, rebound in the pat- terned red-lily parchment paper. When I switch off my bed-light, I realize that I might have seen Lawrence there. MARCH T Idream of Havelock Ellis with his white beard. We had once talked of old English public houses or pubs as they call them. We goon with thisconversation. [don'tremember what it led up to, but he talks about the ‘doors.’ I finally think in my dream, ‘He has forgotten 1 am a woman and do not go into pubsor saloons~ men evidently discuss various pubsand pub- doors like this among themselves.’ But it is Havelock Ellis, Propped up in bed, who has the rdle of the invalid or analy. sand while I who sit beside him am the analyst. Then Havelock Ellis becomes the analyst in the Professor’s place but, reclining on the couch, I think, ‘Havelock Ellis will be bored, he doesn’t really care for psychoanalysis nor really know much about it; how can I expect him to be interested or tounderstand me?” We then seem to goon with the conversa tion in an ordinary way; he wants tofind a French girl ‘with a perfect accent.’ I say, ‘My daughter has a perfect accent.’ I wake to realize that someone is rapping ~ a letter is slipped under my door. Thave been frightened, I do not want to mention blood to the Professor. opened the front door, ran out to welcome my father in the dark and found blood on his head, dripping . ‘This was soon after we moved from Bethlehem to the Flower Observatory, outside Philadelphia, The cause of my father’s accident always remained a mystery. He might have slipped off the old-fashioned steam tram or the local train engine might have backfired. We were not allowed to see our father +138 ADVENT. for some days. We were afraid he might be dead. When we finally went tohisroom he was propped up, a1 had imagined Havelock Ellis in the dream, but his hair and beard had turned white, Itwas another father, wax-pale,a ghost, Ithink Iwas ten yearsold at that time. Ihad ‘forgotten’ this until I began my work with Miss Chadwick Thad ‘forgotten’ my father’s accident for thirty-five years. I try to outline in a detached way the story of the three ct dren finding their father. I qualify my terror of death by saying, ‘We overheard Mr. Evans, one of our father's assist- ants at the Observatory, say it was concussion of the brain. ‘The Professor waved this aside. ‘It could not have been con- cussion, ’he said, Idid not know whether he wastrying tospare me distress, orif he felt Ihad in some way forced this recital. Sigmund Freud said at our next session that he saw ‘from signs’ that I did not want to be analyzed. Thad seen a beautiful etching of him in an art-shop, on the Ring “Today, Iwent and ordered a copy Tam sick today, shaken, unnerved, disoriented. feel I should discuss my father’s accident and the discov- ery of thissubmerged, long-delayed shock. Yes, it is true, he must see my conflict ‘from signs.” How can I tell him of my constant pre-vision of disaster? Itis better to have an unsuccessful or ‘delayed’ analysis than to bring my actual terror of the lurking Nazi menace into the open. Yes, I was ‘Buried Alive.” Isthis why my thoughts return to Lawrence? Ican only remember that last book he wrote. The Man Who Died was buried alive. +139TRIBUTE TO FREUD MARGH 8, WEDNESDAY Idream of a photograph of an unbearded D. H. Lawrence. I had such a photograph of my father, taken when he was six- teen or seventeen before he went with his brother to the war. There were daguerreotypes of these two brothers, taken when they were a little younger. The older brother was by far the more attractive. But [looked into the reflecting surface of the silver plate of the younger, and [looked out at myself, Thirst met Lawrence in August 1914 at the time of the actual outbreak of war; he looked taller in evening-dress. It was the only time I saw this unbearded manifestation of Lawrence, Richard Aldington said afterwards that Lawrence looked like asoldier in mufti In my dream, there is a neat ‘professional’ woman with Lawrence and there isa group of children. Is the ‘professional’ woman asort of secretary? I acted fora short time as secretary tomy father. Lawrence at one time wasa school-masterand [always had alonging toteach. The children in this dream ‘class’ or family are of assorted sizes; they stand back of Lawrence and the young woman, grouped round a piano, My mother taught music and painting at one time, at the old Seminary. Now the children resolve or dissolveintoa pictureofanum- ber of models of full-rigged ships. Havelock Ellis’ father was a sea captain and one of my father’s textbooks was Practical Astronomy A pplied to Navigation. I think, ‘Of course, in England, these children would have the advantage of all those ships.’ But in my dream, I take out a volume from a shelf of Law- rence novels, I open it; disappointed, I say, ‘But his psychol- ogy is nonsense,” Tenvied these women who have written memoirs of D. H. “140+ Lawrence, feeling that they had found him somesort of guide or master. I envied Bryher her hero-worship of the psy- choanalyst Dr. Hanns Sachs. Icannot be disappointed in Sig- mund Freud, only I have this constant obsession that the analysis will be broken by death. Icannot discuss this with the Professor. When he first greeted me, he reminded me of Lawrence. The Professor said tome today, when Ientered the consult- ing room, ‘I was thinking about what you said, about its not being worthwhile to love an old man of seventy-seven.’ I had said no such thing and told him so. He smiled his ironical crooked smile. I said, ‘I did not say it was not worthwhile, I said I was afraid.” sedead Butheconfused me, Hesaid, ‘In analysis, the person isdea after the analysis is over.’ Which person? He said, ‘It would not matter if I were seventy-seven ot forty-seven,’ I now remember that I will be forty-seven on my next birthday. On my birthday, for that one day, Lawrence would be forty- The Professor had sid, In analysis, the personisdead after the analysis is over ~ as dead as your father.’ . remember Norman Douglas saying, ‘Just as we're all get- ting over this Jesus Christ business, trust another Jew to come along and upset all our calculations.’ For one day in the year, H.D. and D. H. Lawrence were twins, But [had not actually realized this until after his death He was born September 11, 1885: I was born September 10, 1886, Stephen Guest brought me acopy of The Man Who Died. He said, ‘Did you know that you are the priestess of Isis in this book?” Perhaps I would never have read the book if Stephen had not brought it to me. Actually, I might have had at first a +14.